I wanted to make a mounted deer head for my rustic cabin scene as to experiment around with ZBrush. I’d seen that the smoothing and sculpting tools were easy to approach in ZBrush and could make some highly detailed things but when making things before i’d started off with a basic human head shape. I Decided to start off with a basic reference photo from google images and make a geometric low poly deer head.
After this it was just a simple task of adding in edge loops with symmetry and pulling apart polygons until i had a very rough shape of what it was going to be. I did this in an orthographic view port facing head on just to pull apart polygons as i found it easier to do then using a proper spline setup.
After this it was looking fairly good in an orthographic viewport but it had no depth to it on the Z Axis. Using just the perspective view and the soft brush i went about pulling out vertices on the Z Axis and giving it more depth.
It started coming along with adding more edge loops into parts like the horns and pulling out the edges very quickly.
After this the low poly head was done, i got both versions of what it would look like subdivided and polygonal and took it into ZBrush afterwards.
In ZBrush i went about both using the DemStandard cut tools and the move tool to pull apart and smooth the mesh down to get some results that i liked. I focused on deforming both the horns to look a little more organic then before and tweaking the eyes a lot. A lot of the difficulty i found with doing this was finding out the organic shape of what a deer’s head looks like with muscular structure, as all deer have fur covering the skin, and had to deduce through a lot of refrence images what it would look like.
Overall i’m happy with the way it looks now aside from the hole in the mesh that i’ll need to sort out, and may just add some more polys to flesh it out a bit more. Afterwards i’m not concerned on adding texture to the skin as this will be covered with fur and i may do so using Maya’s Bifrost engine.
After working with my professor Nick later on, i managed to fix this small hole in the bottom left of the mesh by closing up the hole using the move tools as much as i could, and then remeshing the subtool. I made sure to go inbetween undoing and redoing this to get the hole closed while still trying to keep the mesh as detailed as possible, as remeshing at a high level destroyed all detail. I let the project lay dormant after a while as i had some other things i needed doing, and then came back into the project after revisiting some of the ZBrush work from Week 5. I used the polypaint to make a very simple colour outline, and then decided to record the rest, using a combination of different colours in painting, smoothing the colours together, adding in textures via alphas, going back and subdiving the mesh more to get better detail on the alphas, and overall making the deer look much better.
Below is the process of doing this at over 2500x speed.
After this the deer was finshed, after being subdivided at around 5 million polys. i took this into Maya after using the UV Master tools to create a UV and making a displacement map / texture, after adjusting the bump on the displacement map to not explode all over the place, i realized something was wrong with the actual mesh.
I had some theories as to what was happening, but most of them stemmed from when i began subdividing in the process of creating this in ZBrush, as after remeshing my mesh had lost a lot of polys and when adding in alpha detail i had to divide again. I believe this broke the mesh in a weird way in ZBrush, as after consulting my prof Nick and getting his gracious help, The problem was in fact that ZBrush had broken up the mesh when exporting, which would cause major issues when applying textures and displacement. This was solved by turning off textures and displacements, grouping together all subtools, and then checking using the grid feature inZBrush to make sure the mesh was all in one object. I eventually used this exact process again when creating my Nordic Axe to make certain it would transfer properly into Maya. I imported the Deer into Maya and fixed the bump map once again blowing up even though it looked fairly neat.
After this it was finally done. I imported it into my scene and rendered it out. Overall i learned a fair amount i feel, and got a bit of a better feel about what i should and shouldn’t do when using ZBrush in terms of the workflow and also helped me learn to troubleshoot some issues like things not grouping or holes in a mesh.
I also built a very small plaque for the head to rest on in the scene out of wood in the shape of a pentagon simply using some edge loops and moving them around, though as this was in a dimly lit area in the scene for my room its not as visible