How Jelmer Boskma used ZBrush to create novel zombies for Warm Bodies In this interview, he describes his workflow and talks about concept art of creatures.

Over the years, Jelmer Boskma (known at ZBC under the user name Jelmer) has used ZBrush to create some truly memorable characters. Who could forget his treatment of Johnny Depp, or his Senator Tumblestone and Mr. Bigears creations? Over the last couple of years he has been pretty quiet on ZBC but that certainly isn’t because he hasn’t been creative! In fact he has been extremely busy, working on such projects as Tron: Legacy, Thor and more recently, Warm Bodies.

While zombies have appeared in a large number of productions over the years, Look Effects and Jelmer wanted to give them a new twist: creating a look where their clothing had actually begun to become absorbed into their decaying bodies. In today’s interview, he talks about how ZBrush was used to help accomplish that – and much more!

Besides being under a full time contract with Look Effects, I run my own company through which I take on design work for film and television. The design work tends to be for smaller productions, both for makeup effects and VFX projects. The work I do at Look Effects is all in post production. I've ended up doing a fair bit of concept and paintover work at Look Effects as well, so there is some similarity.

The work in post production can sometimes be a bit technical and precise. The concept work allows me the opportunity to quickly generate ideas and give my work a more personal touch. I greatly enjoy both fields, especially in the current position I have at Look Effects where I get to combine a lot of my interests. I have an interest in pretty much all artistic aspects of a film production, whether it's makeup, vfx, set or costume design. Being involved with concept work early on, and then through the sculpting of our creatures or painting matte extensions is a great luxury. But the variety is something I need.

I was contacted by Look Effects when they were just awarded the show. Look had generated a fair bit of buzz with their excellent work on Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan", but had not done any full-on creature work before. At that moment in time, they were able to show me some of the early concept work for the creatures done by Peter Konig, which greatly excited me. I had been familiar with Peter's work for many years, and have always been a fan of his sensibility and design sense. The concepts for the "boneys" had the right elements to make it feasible for a smaller studio to make it work on screen. The timing worked out, plus the opportunity to help getting a creature pipeline off the ground fora brand new facility in Vancouver... well it all sounded great!

Having been on board throughout the entire project, I played a few different roles. I started out translating Peter's approved final painting into a digital maquette using ZBrush.

After approval was given, I moved on to modeling the animation cage and finishing the final details on the model.

After finishing the initial model I supervised the asset work, which included the creation of all our boney variations. Included in the asset work was the creation of an extensive facial and corrective blend shapes library for the boneys.

Throughout the entire project I found myself doing concepts, paintovers and in the later stages, after Look dev had been pretty much finalized on the boneys, I moved on to working on matte paintings.

I am a big fan of the direction ZBrush has taken with regards to quickly generating form from scratch. I have found myself using ZBrush a lot more for concept work over the last couple of years, mainly because of it's newer features such as Dynamesh.

At this point in time, I can say that my workflow for asset creation has been completely flipped around as well. Not too long ago, one was forced to focus on creating a clean high-resolution mesh before any sculpting could happen. That was mainly because it's beneficial to provide the riggers with a model as soon as possible. Details would then added by modelers in tandem.

These days I start sculpting right away, mostly just starting from a DynaMesh sphere. I don't worry about creating the animation mesh until later, after the client is happy with the look. The overall speed with which ZBrush allows me to work makes this possible. It really was a no brainer to introduce ZBrush to the pipeline at Look Effects.

With DynaMesh we were able to get approval from Jonathan Levine (director of the film) on the model, before we had to build the animation mesh. I think it worked out very well for both us and for Jonathan, who was relatively new to VFX and the digital production process. I think it was great that he was able to look at full rotations of a fairly detailed boney without having to wait on us to finish an intricate polygonal wire model first.

The Best Preview Render tools were great to generate quick, nice looking turntables without ever having to leave ZBrush or occupy our render farm. This was especially useful during the initial stages, where we were pinning down the look of the boneys whilst working on the blendshapes.

DynaMesh again came heavily into play while doing the variation concepts. Taking the initial model, moving proportions around and resculpting some facial features could be done very quickly in ZBrush. A little bit of Polypaint and playing with some additional "rim lights" helped to create a base which was taken into Photoshop for the final touches.

It's incredible to see how ZBrush has evolved its toolkit over the years. The first version I worked in was ZBrush 2.0, which I used only to detail models through bump maps. Since then it has become my main tool for asset creation and concept work. ShadowBox, DynaMesh, Polypaint and Best Preview Render are all amazing additions that have become central tools in my workflow.

Once concepts were approved, it was really just a matter of cleaning up. Having a 3D base in ZBrush to start from instead of just a 2D painting is a big time saver. There's of course still a significant amount of traditional polygonal modeling involved to ensure proper deformation, but even that process is much faster these days.

One of the ideas for the boneys was that these decrepit creatures had been rotting and decomposing for so long that their clothes had started to merge with the organic matter of what was left of their bodies. The decision was made that instead of modeling the clothes as separate assets we would actually sculpt them into our models.

I can't think of many other situations were this approach would work, due to deformation and simulation, but for the this occasion it worked very well. To achieve the right effect, we ended up painting detailed "cloth masks" in Mari, which we then exported and loaded back into ZBrush as black and white textures. We transformed these textures into a mask so that we could sculpt the cloth form and texture exactly where we wanted it.

It allowed us to line up our textures perfectly as well as have the masks ready for our shader work later on. Instead of just layering on a cloth texture in a more procedural manner, sculpting folds and fabric in ZBrush allowed us to add just a little bit more finesse and form.

Being able to see the model with its finest details, wrinkles, pores, etc. is crucial to ensure proper deformation at that level. Simply being able to see the face deform with all its details present was very helpful since our boneys did not have a regular face anymore. Many of their facial muscles and much of their skin tissue wasn't present and thus not all facial expressions were possible. You'd be surprised how hard it is to smile without lips, for instance!

We took some liberty here and there to create shapes that might not have been physically possible anymore. But when one is trying to breath life into creatures that have been dead for so many years, I think a little cheating is allowed.

All faceshapes were started in Maya, where the main masses were moved around and then brought into ZBrush as soon as possible. That's where we could check the morphs by importing the face shape as its own layer. I always had the original model in its neutral state present to ensure no skeletal features were moved around. This let us create the illusion that muscle and skin mass were sliding over the underlying bone structure. (Which should always be the goal with facial blendshapes.)

Once the bigger shapes and muscles were sliding in a believable manner, some time was spent in sharpening or softening the face wrinkles a bit to add more believability to each shape. The final morph layers were exported back into maya and the individual displacement maps were baked in. These were connected with their corresponding blendshapes through our shader. Every time an animator would dial in one of these shapes, the shader would calculate the difference between the base displacement and the blendshape displacement map and set this "key-driven displacement map" to the right value.

You always try to do the best job possible within the limits of budget and time available. What is paramount in most projects is the story. Visual effects are there to help tell that story; not to stand out and pull the audience out of the movie.

Then again we have movies like Tron or Avatar where visual effects are a crucial part of the movie and their presence is inescapable.

When you are creating such immersive experiences, your effects need to be allocated the kind of time and funding that ensures audiences receive a high quality product where they won't see a shoddy VFX shot and have the illusion of that world shatter.

By contrast, something like Warm Bodies uses effects on a much more humble scale where the success of the movie is not quite so dependent on the work we do. As opposed to, say, the overall story and character interactions.

Well, first of all the price for what you get with ZBrush is fantastic considering that I use it for concepting, asset creation, blend shapes, texturing, etc. Its an integral part of our pipeline and my own personal workflow.

I'm consistently able to get high quality visual results off to our clients for quick approvals thanks to all the features that are now a part of the program. In short -- financially and timewise -- its invaluable.

I was very fortunate with the other people on the team at LOOK Effects. For Warm Bodies we really had to hit the ground running. Besides assembling a team for the project, we were getting a brand new facility set up AND a creature pipeline off the ground. It really was like laying down the tracks while the train was already moving at full steam. This being a smaller production, we had a fairly small crew. The individual talents of everybody on the team truly helped getting us to the finish line. I would especially like to give a big shout out to the people on the creatures and asset team: Michael Miller, Magnus Skagerlund, Blair Welscher, CG Supervisor Dmitry Vinnik and Digital Supervisor Mat Krentz.

Please join us in thanking Jelmer for sharing the information and artwork in this interview. Thank you also to Look Effects for their cooperation in making it happen.