This monthly newsletter will keep you up to date on interesting ZBrush news, recent posts at ZBrushCentral and all the amazing ZBrush resources available. Consider it your own little copy of ZBrushCentral in your inbox. We hope you enjoy and happy Pixoling!Revealed in the pages of ZBrush central is a veritable zoo of creatures that roamed the earth millennia ago. Delving a bit further, the oviraptor, dicynodon, crinoides, halucigenia, and liopleurodon seem to live somewhere inside the pages of Hox.fr. While many of us create monsters that dwell in the deep recesses of our sometimes twisted psyches, French artists Marc Boulay and Sylvia Lorrain have forged a partnership of pixols and pixels.
Marc, an organic modeler, provides the structure for Sylvia’s glorious textures. As they generously exhibit in their making-of demo (it's worth finding a pc to run these, by the way), Marc works with ZBrush; beginning with simple, basic forms that are refined to the point that Sylvia takes brings them to Photoshop for texturing. There, she transforms the exquisite models into ancient creatures that roamed the earth and swam the extensive seas over 200 million years ago.
Immerse yourself on hox.fr, and you'll find yourself in a world only familiar if you watch National Geographic specials, dive in the deepest seas, or if you happened to have a copy of Cosinus 73 from June 2003, where these remarkable illustrations accompanied an article by Paleontologist Jean Sebastien Steyer. These illustrations give the artists the chance to "connect their common passions on bio-diversity and animal observation." As they explain on their website, photography and microphotography enable the artists to combine and integrate their work, "Thanks to the mixed techniques of organic modeling and photorealistic 2d/3d, we can represent the past and the present to imagine the future."
More than paleontological depictions, however, Marc and Sylvia's creatures reveal our current animal companions' ancestry. The Dsungaripterus could well find the Pelican in its family tree and the frighteningly beautiful Liopleurodons most likely patrols our seas as the shark. Sylvia's process is much like that of a matte painter. As she describes on ZBC, "I usually compose backgrounds with a mix of photos (between 2 and 15, it depends). Sometimes, I use a basis made with terragen for the ground, then make a collage." Paraphrasing from hox.fr, they comment "these new technologies affirm our style where realism and hyper realism combine to create a style not different than the life itself."
The combination of Marc's models and Sylvia's textures and natural habitats gives us the sense that these creatures could in fact show up one afternoon at the beach, though, as the Liopleurodon was the largest predator, we can only hope that they're only as real as Marc and Sylvia can make them.
Visit Marc Boulay's website - Visit Sylvia Lorrain's website - Visit Sylvia's & Marc's website
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