Lord of Bones Head Sculpt

So here it is, the lord of bones head sculpt I promised that would follow the concept piece. I wanted to keep this a sculpt and let it do the talking material wise, which I think has worked pretty well. I was surprised at how intense the sculpt had to be to be effective when you zoom away from your model. I'll talk a little more about this and any tips I have picked up at the end.

First I'll break down how I made this, its quite simple really once you know the basic Zbrush tools and how Dynamesh works, I don't have any custom alphas, I think it's best to keep it simple when learning a new program and custom brushes aren't everything.

So to get a good head start, if you didn't already know in the Lightbox section of Zbrush under tools there is a full anatomy model complete with muscles and skeleton. Obviously all I needed for this was the skull and some of the spine, so with this as the base I simple used the move brush to pull the eye sockets of the skull around to make it a little more menacing, as well as break up some of the symmetry in some areas. I'd say the best way to start is always with the move brush and nothing else, keep the Dynamesh resolution fairly low as you can always re-mesh it when the verts are being pulled to much, then continue.
Same thing with the plates around the face, keep it rough and use the clip curves brush to cut the plates into shape. The tiger skull I made from scratch, with a Dynameshed sphere and some reference images on my second pc, same as before I blocked out the shape with the move tool. Obviously this isn't an exact type of tiger, i had many reference images open, so I went for a sabre tooth skull and then added extra horns from the sides and deer antlers out of the top just to make it more interesting, as this character is made up of the remains of various humans and creatures, I wanted to get that idea across. Once everything was roughly in place then its time to get the sculpting brushes out.

Main brush I used for this was the Clay Buildup with a square alpha, I really like this brush with a square alpha on it even for organic shapes. You can create some nice texture to your sculpt and knock in important features very quickly. I try to stay away from smoothing the sculpt to much as well as this takes a lot of the texture away, it makes it feel flat.
Simple really I just used this brush to build up areas, cut into parts of the skulls and bone to make deep holes for the eye sockets and nose etc. Also on a low intensity I brushed over all of the model to give a base texture to the bone.

As for things like the teeth, horns, and the wings at the back, its a combination of brushes but very quick to make. Insert a cylinder and move it into position, Dynamesh it, use the move brush to get the rough shape. The Snake hook brush to get bit of a point, then the pinch brush to sharpen it. you can also use the inflate brush to increase and decrease (if you hold the alt key) areas.

Finally the detailing, its mainly just adding more texture to the model or anything interesting. In this case mainly texture as bone has an interesting finish. I have a cow skull in my room that I found walking in the Pyrenees mountains one year (its super clean, it must have been there for years) So I had a good look at the surface, and there's a lot of tiny cracks and ridges throughout the skull, even in the smoothest areas, its very pitted. So I had to get that kind of micro surface detail in the mesh to make it look like bone. This is where the alphas are your best friend, I just use the standard clay brush and on a fairly low intensity used different alphas as you can see below.

Just experiment and you can find some really nice combos. That's about it, from working on this I'd say I learned that it's important to zoom away from your model often when sculpting, certainly in the detailing phase. You can sculpt a whole piece of armour and it looks great close up but when you zoom away the detailing isn't strong enough, the details just fade away.

That's it for today, if you like my work, or CG work in general and want to learn a little more about how I go about making my work then follow me for new posts every day.