Painting the Interdimensional Traveler - ZBrush Creature Design: Creating Dynamic Concept Imagery for Film and Games - page 322

After I've sculpted in all the muscle, sinew, joints, and skeletal plates, I start to think about surface detail
( Figures 5-96 and 5-97 ). Again, I am going for something insect-like. I didn't want it to be too noisy a tex-
ture. I was very happy with the detail of the body shapes with their interlocking, puzzle-like formations,
and the semi-open, fibrous slitted areas and didn't want to bury this behind a super busy surface detail. For
surface detail, I do a lot of freehand sculpting and then supplement with custom brushes, which use my own
alphas rather than using straight alphas. Each time I use an alpha, I go in and customize the settings on the
alpha as well as tweak the settings of the brush (almost always a Standard brush). So, rather than doing this
over and over, I make a new brush with all the custom settings in place. I also prefer to make my own alphas,
but there are a few from the Pixologic Download Center that I employ straight out of the box.
Figure 5-96: The surface texture is coarse but understated so as not to overpower the design.