Dragon bust

Our first task was to get familiar with Zbrush sculpting tools by creating character bust. As I already been familiar with most of them because of my Spec3D project I decided to use this opportunity for something more. I wanted to explore rendering in Zbrush.

At the lecture I started basic sculpt of some sort of lizard. I went with sphere->dynamesh method as it felt most appropriate for that kind of task.

When I got back home I made myself a moodboard. I always work with reference as I feel that it improves the quality of my work. There are too many things in the world to simply remember how all of them work and look. 

At that point I decided that I want to go with some sort oh humanoid dragon creature. So I blended the anatomy of the dragon/lizard head with human shoulders.

I gave him very large trapezius muscle to create more gradual transition from body to the head, like on actual lizards.  At that point I had about 70% of mys design do and it was just a matter of polishing and putting more details. To create some patterns on armor and jewellery I made some custom alphas.

I used a bit of gaussian blur on both of them, it helps to get rid of harsh pixelated edges. 

When all sculpting been done I used default Zbrush alphas to create skin texture. I didn't use it on all the surtface, just on some spots, it is enough to trick the eye into thinking that this is a skin.

All the colours and textures been added in Photoshop. I made many different render passes in Zbrush, some were for rim lights, some were for shadows. Horns and gold bits were on separate subtools, so I just rendered them with different materials. 

You can find a high res image here - http://www.artstation.com/artwork/dragon-concept