An Old Flame - ZBrush Skull

In a lot of my original concepts, you find skulls and bones and all those other such Medieval cliche's in almost all of them. It was then it dawned on me that I had such a prop at my disposal.

Before returning to University in September, I decided to try my hand a bit more seriously at ZBrush. Upon learning it, and finding out I got on really well with it, I decided to take one of Ryan Kingslien's 'ZBrush Workshops'.



This model was initially made with ZSpheres and then topology was altered to give it, it's look. It's not fantastic even with high detail, but this is the skull with a very low SubDivision count so lost ALOT of detail.
NOTE: I would normally lower it even more after creating a normal map on the original, then project that on the low res version in Maya - However, since I will be using a special shader in my scene, a normal wouldn't show either way. So I've kept the topology fairly neat and understandable.



Saying all this, Maya and ZBrush still hate seemingly hate each other, because after smooth previewing in Maya (as unsmoothed looks ghastly), this 'LowRes' Model is still a Behemoth with regards to poly count.





After a while of reducing faces and edges, and making alterations in the geometry, I managed to make the skull work. It's lost a lot of detail, but enough to still stand out with the etching shader.

It's nice to have finally found a use for this :)