Sketch of monster for 3D sculpting

Posted on June 8, 2015

by jayanam

Yesterday I sketched a little monster, just an idea of a guy with 3 eyes and dangerous spikes that could kill.

Here he is from the front:

Monster front

and from the side:

I will model it in the next days cause I need a big bad guy for the game Erwin’s Timewarp which I am currently developing. It will be created with Blender / ZBrush and Substance Painter and I let you know about the progress.

But I have to say that I don’t use sketches for characters in the 3D modelling software directly as reference. I watch them during my sculpting and as I model and sculpt I get new ideas. I have the feeling when using the image as reference in the 3d view of Blender by example, new ideas get lost sometimes and it limits my creativity.

What do you think?

Base mesh Blender

I started the base mesh and used dynamic topology in Blender for the mouth part – just to get an impression. The basic object is a sphere and I used dyntopo from the start and the Snake Hook brush to move it into shape. To create the little spikes above the mouth I added small point masks, inverted these and then used the Snake Hook to pull them out of the head.

Blender dynamic topology sculpt

For the eyes I will start the same way: Create a mask of points and invert with Ctrl + I key:

Snake Hook on inverted mask

Then I clear the mask (Alt + M key) and moved the eyes out, it’s a little bit like the ZBrush workflow with Dynamesh:

Eyes pulled out with dyntopo

I have to say that it looks kind of more aggressive than I wanted it to be:-) We will see if I keep it this way when I added the eyes and spikes. I think I will try a combination of arms and spikes on the sides of the guy.

At a certain stage of sculpting I turn on some lights using the Blender quick preferences addon, it’s a nice assistance, I think I will write a special tutorial about using it.

Lights with quick preferences addon

And here youcan see that I let the ideas flow. I use the reference images just for inspiration, then I add other parts which were never part of the concept:

Monster Sculpt proceeding in Blender

05-10-2015: For the arms I added a separate object, starting from a simple cube. Then I used again dyntopo to sculpt it. Then I had one arm. To union it with the main sculpt, I used the Union operation of the Sculpt Tool UI addon I already wrote an article about. After the merge I executed the Symmetrize action in the Dyntopo panel. The eyes are just UV-sphere objects at the moment: