Guardian of the Cloud Temple, by Michael Taflove

I sculpted this centaur-esque creature in Zbrush, fusing human with horse and fantasy anatomy. I spent a long time trying to accurately replicate the human and horse musculature. Behold the trapezius, the greater trocanter, the rectus femoris!

I created this creature from scratch, literally starting with only a polygon cube in Maya. However, I heavily based the creature on a pre-existing concept design by Mauro Patrizi, using his work as a visual reference.

The music is "Gelfling Song" by Trevor Jones, from the Dark Crystal.

I used the new Decimation Master plugin for Zbrush to export the model into Maya. I then rendered it with Mental Ray in two rendering passes: sub-surface scattering (sss) and ambient occlusion (aocc). This process took many hours of rendering time. I found the sss pass washed out a lot of the muscle detail, but the aocc pass brought most of it back. Rendering in Mental Ray was a very long and frustrating process, and I almost feel like a Zbrush turntable would look better, with the default matcap materials. If anyone knows of some good Mental Ray tutorials, please let me know.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Michael
• Taflove
• Nathan
• Pixologic
• ZBrush
• Autodesk
• Maya
• fantasy
• centaur
• 3d
• animation
• sculpt
• video
• game
• anime
• horror
• demon

[Zovex11]

I i'm totally going to build this on spore!! (credit will be given)

[cowsquid]

cool, I'd like to see it. I was thinking of trying Spore. I wonder if Spore and ZBrush can be used together?

[Zovex11]

I don't know, but that would be cool if you could! I'll send you a link to it when i make it =]

[cowsquid]

awesome, I like it-- can you animate it?

[jay666999]

your mind is awesomely fucked up friend

[dieselboy87]

he should cook his pork more thoroughly next time...

[ObscenityOlivia]

I think this is quite beautiful. For some reason, there's something quite obscene and therefore vaguely erotic about it. Don't know what that says about me. O_o

[DasterTheStalker]

its RaptorJesus

[narutonut48]

@cowsquid

hey i think that guy is not going to make it so i did i am finished but message me about the collors ok

[Omegaroth]

awesome model but you should make your sss shader more solid and less transparent because it seems like the light might be shining through too much at the head. it's really red

[levipwndHD]

you make creepy stuff but i like it :P

[WuvableKel]

If I ever see something like this, I don't care where I am... I am jumping from a window.

[duleziv]

great concept.. great pose

[gumballcrash]

I feel your pain right now when it comes to rendering in anything other than Zbrush. I can get some pretty fantastic renders in zbrush easily, but mental ray is pretty difficult. Fantastic job though! Your hard work definitely paid off.