This is the vertebrae model I made for my final Maya project. Basically what I did was divide each segment into two individually modeled pieces. This enabled me to have more control over the basic shape of the whole vertebra. Once I had a good basic shape, I then duplicated it and made slight adjustments such as rotation, position and scale to create the curvature that you see. In ZBrush a single geometric object, or mesh, is referred to as a “Tool”, hence each subsequent duplicate is called a Subtool. If I had added a completely different piece of geometry to the same Tool then that would also be called a Subtool.
In these renders you cans see quite a bit of detail that was added with the Surface Noise function and graphic editor within ZBrush. However when I exported this as an OBJ file I needed to lower the resolution of the geometry so that it would be manageable to work with in Maya. For that I used Unify Skin to make a mesh with a less dense geometry, and if I had wanted to use the same look and texture I would have also exported texture maps and displacement maps to get the same look without the expensive geometry.
Eric Chamberlain 