The Beast - ZBrush Sculpture Series — VOL 02

Volume two of the ZBrush Sculpture Series is a beast head, sculpted from scratch in two hours of ZBrush. Where volume one worked a human face, this one works a creature's, and the added difficulty is not detail but expression: the sculpt has to carry a readable mood across a face whose anatomy nobody has memorised.

That is the reason to take this volume specifically. Creature sculpting goes wrong at the point where wrinkles and pores get added to a face that is not doing anything, and the fix is upstream — in the set of the brow, the pull of the mouth, the asymmetry that stops a head looking like a mask. The 120 minutes are spent mostly there, with the fine detail passes coming after the expression is settled.

What you get

• ✓120 minutes sculpting a beast head from scratch in ZBrush
• ✓Facial forms and the expression carried on them, worked before the detail
• ✓Detail passes over the finished structure
• ✓Beginner to intermediate, with modelling technique the focus throughout
• ✓No spoken commentary and no captions on any chapter

It is the shortest route in this series to a creature bust, and two hours is a realistic amount of time to give a study piece. Anyone building a range of heads for a portfolio tends to get more out of doing three of these volumes at speed than out of one long character: repetition is where anatomy starts being remembered rather than copied.

Level, and what is not in it

Beginner to intermediate. You should already be able to navigate ZBrush and use its primary functions; the sculpt itself starts from nothing. Neither the finished sculpt nor the ZBrush project comes with it.