Can You Recommend Any Comprehensive Creature Modelling Tutorial / Course?
polycounter lvl 9
Hey guys,
I'm looking for tutorials that explain in detail modelling creatures (example: Zhelong Xu's Chi-Dragon ). Particularly, what interests me is techniques for building interesting shapes, custom alphas / vector displacement maps and creating balance between low - mid and high frequency detail.
I know Gnomon offers some creature courses but they seem to be far from the stuff that I'd like to master; Zhelong'swork is a good reference point.
Replies
Besides Gnomon, I know there is a few here and there on gumroad, though I don't have them saved. But if you go through all of the tutorials from as many artist as you can find, you are easily going to have all the technical competence to make whatever you can imagine. As to the style and artistic sense, I don't know I have honestly never seen a tutorial that really covered content like that. You might look for concept artist tutorials, which will be 2d tool focused but may cover more of the design thought process. I've done a few photoshop tutorials just to learn the UI a bit better and surprisingly picked up some nice tips for improving artistic sense and so on.
I think it's just a matter of lots of iteration to learn how to express your own unique style. Of course, following another's way of doing is a skill you got to have, so maybe just continuing to analyze this artists' work and trying to mimic it is the best/only way to go.
So you want creature tutorials that skew towards East Asian influenced designs?
Well, not necessarily. I am fascinated by his smart way of delivering unique shapes that are seemingly not that complicated yet taking it from a distant perspective at the whole, the end design is spectacular (and intricate).
Michael Pavlovich comes too mind, his High-Res Creature Production series is quite comprehensive:
https://gumroad.com/pavlovich