Sculpting – Zbrush 3.1

Now for the fun part. I have only been practising and using Zbrush since the start of the year and thus far only been doing test sculpts and finding my way around this powerful tool. It has been quite fun exploring my potential within this program, though even now that my sculpt is complete I still feel that I need to create more varied and complicated sculpts to find my full potential.

Step By Step

First I imported the posed obj file of my creature and find out how far I could go with the subdivision levels, I ended up making my model nearly 2 million ploys because I could work on my model at home with out slowing my machine down.

Again as with modeling the base mesh I followed Steve Lambert’s sculpting video to see his work flow to find new techniques to speed up my own work flow.

Instead of throwing myself in the deep end I started with a few test sculpts of the head to see what worked and what didn’t so I could really refine the detail of the skin.

Because I’m using the dinosaur from the cowboy era of my game concept It was fun playing with the idea of adding battle damage like bullet holes, tattoos and scars to really give my dinosaur a unique look.

During the test phase I found some of the alpha stamps that I was using need editing to better work on my model. I decided to use Photoshop to edit some of the standard alphas and also the alphas I found on the Internet.

below is an example.

The main sculpt took me about 8 to 10 hours to complete and even with feeling confident enough to start my final sculpt it was a strong learning curve. If I had the chance and the time I would go back and start from scratch, though this doesn’t mean I’m unhappy with this out come, I just learned so much as I came to each part of the body. One example of this was adding the skin folds and skin wrinkles, I had to look and think about how the skin moved on the body were it would crease due to movement. Nigel the second year tutor was very helpful in showing me how this works by using fabric, because it works on the same principles as skin.

Below are the final sculpts of the body and head.