I am fairly new here at CGSociety, and wanted to "break the ice" by sharing a recent work with you guys...
A couple of months ago a client approached us with a request for realistic pterodactyls, and here was the chance to learn and put ZBrush in motion!
The mesh was modeled by my colleague Vander Zafalon, and I tweaked it in Maya to get it as simplified as possible and in proper shape to be exported to ZBrush.
At render time, it is converted to a Catmull-Clark subdivision surface. We coded a special displacement shader that is rigged to work specifically with ZBrush displacement maps, so you don't need to do all that Photoshop tweaking stuff...
ZBrush could not cope with a subdivision level that would allow me to paint this kind of detail directly on the mesh as subdivision information, so I used the bump viewer shader to paint a bump map for the high frequency details.
The shader we developed automatically takes the bump map into account - if one is provided - and renders both the displacement and bump maps as full micropolygon displacements in PRman.
The bump map took the longest time to finish. Every single line was painted one at a time using ZBrush's Deco brush. No alphas or stencils...
The color map was also painted in ZBrush. The displacement map is a 4K 16-bit TIFF file, and both the bump and color maps are 6K PSD files.
The clouds were generated with Maya fluids.
I hope you enjoy it!
Cheers!