So here is the final render of “the King”. He was created entirely in zBrush and took about a weeks worth of late night sculpting sessions to complete. In case you have been out of the loop on this guy. He is a character I designed for the movie Space Chimps in collaboration with Dean Taylor and the rest of the art team while working on the film Space Chimps. Our designs were cut but I resurrected him here to appease my own curiosity.
Render Pains
It was a fun project but took more time than I was expecting as I ran into a bit of trouble towards the end. I like the sculpt but I must admit that I am disappointed with the render. I had all sorts of technical issues and have decided to call it quits.
The rendering of the king himself is ok, but the little Luzian aliens are not properly rendered. Their material is all wrong and should actually look like blown glass. Wouldn’t you know, one of the shortfalls of zBrush is that it can’t render caustics, so no glass. The best it can manage is a sudu-transparent material. It also turns out, you can’t have a transparent object behind another transparent object, to fake glass, as the first object will completely matte out the later. I didn’t know this when I began or else I would have changed my workflow to be able to render in MentalRay. Since I used dynamesh on all the characters they lack UV’s and have insanely high poly counts so Rendering in Maya was out of the question. So in the end rather than glass-like aliens I get waxy, oily looking ones. Sigh. Que Sera, Sera.
Still, render issues aside, everything looks ok and I am happy. I have my closure now and can move on to other things. I learned alot from this project and am glad I did it.
The Making of the king
Here are a few work in progress pictures.
exploring layouts before I begin
a low res render of the kings base mesh.
adding the luzian characters.
sculpting in the details on the kings cape.
finnished the first pass.
another angle on the luzian characters.
base sphere build for the luzian characters
base zsphere build for the king
prepping the basic layout in zspheres, back
prepping the basic layout in zspheres, front
building up the king from the zsphere base mesh.
another perspective on the early layout
front
reverse side detail of the luzians carring the king.
This is from earlier in the week but I never had the time to post it. It’s a A quick tree sculpt I made in ZBrush. The base of the tree was made using zsphears and dynamesh but all the branches, leaves and grass were made with FiberMesh.
Digging though some old files I stumbled across a document explaining my character design ideas for the Space Chimp Aliens.
A Space Chimps Guide to alien Life
At first observation biological classification on the Planet wazoo appears chaotic, irrational and non-sequidor in nature, on closer inspection though one will find a clear distinct set of rules and laws at play. Life on the planet Wazoo can be categorized into three major kingdoms: Vegetables, Fruits, and Nuts. The macro view is that all life on the planet wazoohas evolved from plants.
VEGETABLES
The world
General overview: low on the evolutionary ladder, characters of the Vegetable kingdom tend to be background/environmental elements that generally interact out of reflex and instinct. Vegetables can be distinct individual structures but often tend to clump or organize into larger symbiotic communities. Vegetables, though possessing the capacity for mobility have not evolved any sort of conscious behavior and therefore if left to themselves will generally be content to do nothing. Instinctually lazy they will always choose the path of least resistance.
Design: relatively simple and primitive, very organic, curves, branching structures, etc.
Locomotion: vegetables are limited to simple, non-efficient, rudimentary form of locomonition, for example; crawling, pulling, pushing, sliding, blobbing, pooling. For survival reasons they generally tend to flock together in large migratory herds.
Color: their lazy nature, lack of individual identity and conservative ideals has led the vegetables to lean towards pastels and more muted colors.
Diet: The rich mineral makeup of the planet wazoo
Vocalization: none
Senses: mainly touch, occasionally ocular and smell. In general vegetables have only a single sensory organ.
Cognitive Skills: Vegetables are only able to do simple functions. Though incapable of complex actions their symbiotic relationships with each other is often capable of achieving complex results.
FRUITS
The good guys
General overview: These are distinct characters with an ability to reason, the range of their mental abilities is relative to the phylum and class to which they belong. There are four main Phylum omnipedal, aerfuga(flying), quadrapedal and bipedal. Bipedal being the most intelligent and omnipedal the least. Fruits have distinct and complex communal organization traits. They tend to share strong bonds with their collective environments and tend to suppress selfish ideals. Curious and docile by nature, the fruits tend to be open, creative, sensitive and forgiving. Unfortunatly for the fruits the higher their mental skills the greater their sense of self doubt, hence the general trend of communal rather than individual identity. Fruits tend to look before the leap. Actually they are often so involved with looking and thinking about the various possibilities, variations, reasons for and against leaping that they never get around to leaping at all.
Design: Fruits are made from a gelatinous clear medium and range from the simple to the almost simple, omnipedal being the simplest, followed by aerfuga , quadripedals and then bipedal. Organic smooth, rounded shapes keep the fruits relatively easy on the eye. Smooth and shiny.
Locomotion: Their strong cognitive skills have allowed the fruits to evolve the ability to manipulate their gelatinous structures into many distinct forms of locomotion.
Colors: happy bright colors
Diet: Herbivores
Vocalization: relative to mental capacities
Senses: all
Cognitive Skills: Generally bright, generally put others before themselves
Common descriptors: elegant, bright, fragile, tidy, friendly, radiant, rhythmic
NUTS
The bad guys
General overview: These are distinct characters with a strong inclination towards action and impatient repetitive activity. Millions of years of thoughtless activity have led the Nuts to evolve into asymmetric, bulky, inefficient, clumsy, awkward, poorly balanced creatures who live in the now. A lack of foresight, hindsight and common sense, compounded with a generally good work ethic has led them to being the dominant species on the planet Wazoo. It is difficult to categorize the nuts into distinct Phylum for their erratic rather infunctional evolutionary track is absurd and therefore indefinable. The fate of their species is ruled by the survival of the luckiest. They tend to leap before they look. In the words of their most famous leader, we are gathered hear today…hey look a cloud!
Design: The most complex on the planet but least thought out. Impractical, non-symmetric, tacky, gaudy and awkward, with a flare for flamboyant wastefulness.
Locomotion: Currently the trend has been bipedal motion even though it is awkward for many who have more or less appendages.
Colors: Tacky, bright, intense clashing
Diet: Omnivores, know to eat rocks, sharp sticks, poisoned fruit punch and discarded gum on occasion.
Vocalization: Talk a lot, very opinionated and expresses. Enjoy complimenting each other and themselves.
Senses: all but common sense
Cognitive Skills: Slow, forgetful attracted to shinny things. It has been theorized that they have a very strong collective subconscious
Common Descriptors: Funny, Funny looking, comic, strange, odd, lost, theatric, over the top, #*%&!, awkward, off-beat
After a few months in the story department I was pulled aside by the Directors of Space Chimps and told that they were impressed with my designs and I was asked if I would like to take them a few steps further. They offered me the character designer job which I excitedly excepted. I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to collaborate with our production designer, Dean Taylor! The man did Nightmare Before Christmas for petes sake!
From the beginning one of the big goals we set for ourselves was to create an alien world which was rich and diverse. The last thing we wanted to have was three or four creatures repeating though out the movie. I decided wasn’t just going to design creatures that were mentioned in the script. I was going to draw all the ambient ones as well. So to create a logic to the world I started from the ground up and created a Kingdom, Phylum, Class structure. I built rules and limitations and then built off of those. One of the big ideas was not to design specific creatures but to design elements and then mr. potatohead them together to build thousands of characters. (note: I was really impressed a few months ago when I saw theSpore creature creator which was essentially the same sort of thing I was thinking of.)
Once some of these basic elements were in place, everything just poured out.Everyone was really happy with the work and in no time I had a long list of approved characters. But the party wouldn’t last long.
Barry Sonnerfeld took over as creative producer and everything at the studio was turned on its head. In a character design meeting that I wasn’t invited to Berry cut everything Dean and I were working on. After everything was cut, I was told my “aliens were too appealing” and that “they upstaged the main charcters.”
Here they are in all their overly appealing glory. let me know what you think.
Below is a small sample of some of the character designs that I explored for the King in the movie Space Chimps. It doesn’t include the cornucopia of really great designs by any of the other wonderful artist on the team. In the future if I can get permission I would love to share some of their work as well. Months of work went into these designs and there are a few in here that I think would have been big winners. I would love to here peoples thoughts on what they see.
