Scott Spencer - ZBrush Creature Design: Creating Dynamic Concept Imagery for Film and Games

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Copyright 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-1-118-02433-1
ISBN: 978-1-118-22206-5 (ebk.)
ISBN: 978-1-118-23626-0 (ebk.)
ISBN: 978-1-118-26067-8 (ebk.)

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Dear Reader,

Thank you for choosing ZBrush Creature Design: Creating Dynamic Concept Imagery for Film and Games. This book is part of a family of premium-quality Sybex books, all of which are written by outstanding authors who combine practical experience with a gift for teaching.

Sybex was founded in 1976. More than 30 years later, were still committed to producing consistently exceptional books. With each of our titles, were working hard to set a new standard for the industry. From the paper we print on, to the authors we work with, our goal is to bring you the best books available.

I hope you see all that reflected in these pages. Id be very interested to hear your comments and get your feedback on how were doing. Feel free to let me know what you think about this or any other Sybex book by sending me an email at . Customer feedback is critical to our efforts at Sybex.

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To my partner Meredith Yayanos, whose love, friendship, and inspiration I cherish.

Acknowledgments

There are so many people who bring a book like this to life. I would like to try to thank each of them here. This includes those with a direct hand in the editing and layout as well as those whose support makes this kind of endeavor possible. First, Id like to thank my partner Meredith Yayanos for her loving support, and Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger for their friendship and support. I must thank Richard for giving me such a unique opportunity to travel across the globe and work every day with so many amazingly talented people. I also want to thank Karl Meyer, Brian Sunderlin, and Gentle Giant Studios for giving me a place to start my journey and remaining close and valued friends and mentors to this day.

Thanks also to all the talented artists I have the good fortune to work with at Weta. Thanks to Eric Keller for serving as technical editor and for sharing his expertise by writing on the ZBrush Materials system. Were it not for his experience and knowledge in this area, we would be missing out on a whole range of techniques. Thank you to Ofer Alon, Jaime Labelle, and Paul Gaboury at Pixologic; and to Alex Alvarez, Eric Miller, and everyone else at Gnomon.

A huge thanks to Desmoda and the team at Ownage for the exceptional, quick, and high-quality 3-D printing they did for this book. I encourage anyone with an interest in printing 3-D models from their ZBrush designs to seek out ownage.com and send Desmoda an email. There is nothing quite like holding a physical copy of your maquette in hand in the real world.

Thanks go as well to 3d.sk for allowing me to use their reference images in this book. I have used 3d.sk as a reference site for the past six years and they are an invaluable resource. I cannot express how important it has been to have constant access to an almost unlimited number of royalty-free, high-res, reference images of all kinds of humans, animals, props, and costumes. Please check them out if you havent already at www.3d.sk .

Id also like to thank some of the artists whose tools and techniques have inspired and informed my own process: Neville Page, Zack Petroc, Bryan Wynia, Tristan Schane, Alterton, Paul Tobin, Jerad Marantz, Aaron Simms, Scott Patton, Cesar Dacol, Ian Joyner, and JP Targete. Thank you to Tristan Crane for use of his exceptional photography to illustrate depth of field. I cannot possibly list everyone by name and I apologize to anyone who I have left out. I would also like to thank those incredibly talented artists I am fortunate to work with every day and whose work never ceases to inspire and inform me: David Meng, Greg Tozer, Will Furneaux, Paul Tobin, Gary Hunt, Jamie Beswarick, Mike Asquith, Daniel Falconer, Greg Broadmore, Christian Pierce, Daniel Cockersell, Kim Beaton, Warren Beaton, Steve Lambert, and the many other Weta artists who surround me.