Super clean topology and UVs weren’t the focus of this piece but were required to bring the character inside other software like Substance Painter, my retopology workflow is a mix of automatic tools and manual work. All of those forms were created using a very small group of brushes, I mainly use ten brushes for all my projects: ClayBuildUp (without alpha), Move, SmoothStronger, DamStandard, Standard, Zmodeler, hPolish, Planar, Clay and Inflate. I particularly like those because they support the idea of a curse grown onto/from him, strengthening the underlying message. For doing so I’ve incorporated different real word shape languages that could support the design: you can spot the characteristic ridge of a goat’s horn near the “ear” of the monster, or get inspired by other forms of nature, as an example, I’ve used the tree roots as a shape language where the horns and the spikes join the skull. The challenging part was to make them believable. While for the overall skull you can study real references to understand the material language like the shape of ridges and crevices, the horns had a very fantasy look.
#Keyshot vs marmoset pro
The skull spikes were done using Sculptris Pro plus Snake Hook to build the forms and Trim Dynamic with the hPolish brush to finalize them. That’s the reason why I keep splitting pieces if I feel I need to. You can be quite free in the way you split a mesh in ZBrush since the process to fuse the pieces back together is almost pain-free, you can use DynaMesh or the new operators like "Remesh By Union" with some Smooth plus Sculptris Pro touch-ups.
Keeping them separated allows you to freely move and change the proportions of one piece without accidentally affect another, or using x-mirroring for a longer time on a subset of those SubTools. At this stage I split the head into 4 different parts to make the sculpting process easier: the horns, upper skull, jaw, and soft parts of the head were divided into different SubTools. In the first passes the head was very clean, the main rules are working on the big shapes, proportions, and blockouts, leaving the detailing for later. I always try to keep the DynaMesh resolution as low as possible and up-res it only when it can’t retain the forms. Move and DamStandard brushes were used to layout the main forms. I started with the DynaMesh SubTool and mainly used ClayBuildup with alpha off for a softer result. The rest of the face was more or less open to interpretation. For me, those were the main shape of the horns, the spikes, the zygomatic bone, the frontal bone/eyebrow area, and the chin shape. Approaching the head was quite challenging since what I had in mind was to slightly change it but retain the overall original structure, I first identified the features to retain to make justice to the concept art.
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