How I made an octopus. Again
Scientific illustrator Mieke Roth is back with an amazing model, based on her research of dissecting an octopus. I have covered Mieke’s work before – it’s all very in depth and super interesting.
Before I specialized in animals and their anatomy, my work mainly focused on technical stuff. I still do that, but my heart lies with the stuff you see overwhelmingly on my website.
This post is no different. It harks back to when my specialization began. In the fall of 2011 I was asked to make some cutaways for KIJK, a Dutch popular science magazine. I embraced the opportunity with both hands and made an adventure out of it. So I dissected a real octopus to be able to make a believable cutaway that wasn’t copy from stuff I found on the internet or diagrams in biology books.
The final octopus got great reviews, but even I could see that I still needed to learn a lot regarding the tools I used.
And I loved doing it. In the following years I learned a lot just by doing it, watching how other people did it and the fact that Sketchfab came along, forcing me to be able to optimize models while still maintaining all the details.
So now I am able to make almost anything I set my mind to. And I thought it was time to make an octopus again.
that was a great read. Have you thought of dropping Zbrush altogether and using Blender for everything ?
Thanks Gavin,
Sometimes I only use blender, but for organic stuff Zbrush is unparalleled. I would be easily able to make this one completely in Blender though ;-). Would give a tidier uv map ;-).
Nice work.
There are some very nice addons and brushes for sculpting for Blender on Gumroad.com.
Just search for “Speedsculpt” and “Speedretopo” made by pitywazou_1 and pitywazou.
Thanks Alex,
Yes I know, but it’s my work and I have a process line that is as efficient as possible. I am able to do it all in Blender, but I am using the applications in such a way that I only use them for what they are best at.
i guess either blender or zbrush won’t matter this is a very well done, love to see more
Thank you Alwadhani!
Awesome work, thank for sharing how you create it.
This is an all-around excellent image. Thanks for inspiring us and sharing your methods.