Grove Snail
About
The goal of this project was to 3D sculpt an organic shape or animal. I chose a snail due to the mixture of hard and soft surfaces. The snail also presented the opportunity to render a simple environment. The scene includes a branch with PBR texturing, and grapes with procedural textures and materials. The snail was rigged and posed to provide a sense of curiosity in the small creature.
Media
Zbrush, Blender 3D, Photoshop
Audience
Lay Public
Client
Nicholas Woolridge
Year
2020
References
The primary inspiration for this piece was the incredible photographer, Vyacheslav Mishchenko. He takes wonderful images of snails, and other creatures, exploring their habitats. I found that there was a lot of personality in his pieces, and I hoped to emulate his imagination in my scene.
Model Sheet
These sketches were drawn in order to accurately sculpt the snail in Zbrush.
Asset Creation
The snail model and shell were sculpted in Zbrush. The model sheet was used to block out the snail. After blocking out, the snail was sculpted using the move tool and a variety of brushes.
A spline was used to get the signature Fibonacci curve of the shell. Texture brushes were used to simulate the rough texture of the shell.
Scene Layout & Texturing
The snail was rigged and posed on a branch looking up towards grapes in Blender.
The grapes are simple spheres and the branch was sculpted from a cylinder in Blender.
UV map unwrapping was done in Zbrush. Then the models were polypainted in Zbrush and the texture maps were baked. Color, subsurface, and transparency maps were used for the snail body, and a color map was used for the shell.
A node tree was used to procedurally generate the texture of the grapes in the final image.
A PBR bark texture was incorporated using the free add-on EasyPBR.
All Images
