“Worm fish”

“Worm fish” is a concept sculpt that I did so I could refine my digital sculpting techniques. I haven’t had the opportunity to really see how far I could go with high resolution sculpting applications such as mudbox so I decided to throw myself in at the deep end and see what I could do if I began with the simplest of base meshes.

I have seen a lot of demonstrations on the Internet where someone takes something as simple as a cube and turns it into a monster or a highly detailed human head etc, I decided to try it myself and see if I could make something good.

After a short time of using mudbox’s “grab” tool to block out the basic shape I then subdivided it and began making the tale thinner towards the end and make a hole where the mouth was to be. From their on I sculpted the rest of the forms that made up the main body shape, as I subdivided the model more and more I used a smaller brush size and started sculpting the smaller details such as wrinkles and the protruding vertebrae. Once I had got the model to its final stages I exported the lowest level back to maya so I could give it a basic pose. I then exported that mesh back into mudbox as a layer effectively creating a blendshape in mudbox. That layer was then flattened like when using photoshop’s layers and I adjusted the mesh according to its new pose. This included adding bigger wrinkles and bulging the muscles around areas where there were bends.

The mouth was by far the most complicated area to sculpt, There level of detail in the mouth required the model to be subdivided to a very high level. The final polygon count was just over 19 million polygons, this meant the mudbox file was around 2gb is size. I wanted to take advantage of zbrush’s turntable rendering tools and its matcap materials to bring out all of its details but Zbrush was unable to import a model with so many polygons in a single mesh. I needed to cut the model up into 5 parts, each with about 3.8 million polygons and then import them as subtools.

For a turntable render, click here