Gremlin Chupo. Portrait.

I like English mythology and that's why I decided to do a small project on this topic. I wanted to portray the image of small malevolent creatures, and it is obvious that the choice fell on the gremlins, haters of technology, whose homeland is hidden in dark underground labyrinths.

This time I decided to present the entire creation process on video.

I started modeling the gremlin's face in ZBrush.

I made the basic shape with the DynaMesh tool - from the sphere I sculpted a monolithic figure so that the gremlin model became distinct: the details of the nose, the curves of the mouth, the shape of the torso, adding the ears. The ClayBuildup brush helped me a lot to do this quickly, it builds up volume, and I painted the model with a rough texture. Then I flattened the mesh structure with ZRemesher so that the sharp edges became more pronounced and the polygons there had a higher density than in large smooth areas.

For the next step, I added several levels of geometry density to work with the various brushes that ZBrush has in its arsenal.

Scaled skin was done with a standard brush with a scale texture in its alpha channel. The DamStandard brush leaves a deep furrow that is suitable for folds and wrinkles. Gremlin diversified them around the neck using Cloth brushes. Texturing a model in ZBrush doesn't require any retopology or UVW unwrapping - I drew from the model right away.

According to my idea, the gremlin is located in an underground catacomb. Therefore, dark contrasting lighting is suitable.

The lights are lined up in ZBrush via the Light menu settings. The painting light was directed from the top to the left, and the fill light was directed from the right to compensate for the harsh shadows. Rendered using Best-Preview Render with Best quality. To add volume to the gremlin's lighting, I added the NormalRGBMat shader to the render, which I used to enhance the contrast in the contours of the gremlin's shape during post-processing in Photoshop, and the ReflectedMat shader - it made the reflections more pronounced. Then I placed the shape on a dark gradient background; performed color correction to make the picture warmer. And finally, I applied the depth of field effect on the figure.