Wednesday, April 15th, 2020 Posted by Jim Thacker

Master the art of 3D creature concept design


The Gnomon Workshop has released Original Creature Concepts: a guide to 3D concept design recorded by leading freelance character artist Pablo Munoz Gomez.

The workshop, which comprises over two and half hours of video training, sets out a practical workflow for exploring forms and shape language in ZBrush.

A practical, iterative workflow for developing creature designs in ZBrush
During the training, Munoz Gomez shares his workflow for generating “an original and appealing creature concept” from an arrangement of abstract 3D shapes.

He begins by creating thumbnails in Photoshop, open-source 2D painting tool Krita and ZBrush itself, before moving into 3D to build custom assets that can be assembled into an abstract ‘cluster’.

Munoz Gomez then reveals how he generates variations of the cluster, identifying those that best suggest a creature, before picking an arrangement from which to develop the final design.

The creature is detailed in ZBrush, textured using the software’s Polypaint toolset, and rendered with KeyShot; then the rendered image is finalised in Photoshop.

Throughout the process, Munoz Gomez emphasises the importance of iteration, demonstrating how to generate quick early variations, then refine them into a design with a cohesive visual language.

As well as creating creatures, the workflows shown can be used for any type of concept design.

About the artist
Pablo Munoz Gomez is a freelance concept and character artist and founder of the popular training websites ZBrushGuides and 3DConceptArtist.

As well as creating his own ZBrush training resources, his work has been published in 3DTotal’s books, industry magazines 3D Artist and 3DCreative, and featured on Pixologic’s ZBrush blog.

Pricing and availability
Original Creature Concepts is available via an online subscription to The Gnomon Workshop. Subscriptions cost $49/month or $490/year. You can try the training for free.

Read more about Original Creature Concepts on The Gnomon Workshop website


Full disclosure: CG Channel is owned by Gnomon.