Sculpting Sea Monsters in ZBrush

I own a copy of ZBrush 2022 so I’ve been using it to do more 3D sculpting lately. It keeps me busy and lets me explore my 2D sketch ideas in 3D. (I’ve tried using Blender for this sometimes and it is a lot better than it used to be for sculpting but my computer still gets on better with ZBrush for 3D sculpting).

I’ve wanted to create some sea creatures and sea monsters for a while so this week I started doing just that.

First I made some very sketchy designs in my sketchbook and looked at reference and books to help inspire different ideas.

I don’t spend too long on this stage because I want the ideas to flow and I will be using 3D to explore them more anyway. Trying different shapes and proportions is my main concern in the early stage before thinking more about specific details.

So far I’ve made three different designs using ZBrush over this last week. I wanted to keep them fairly rough but finished enough to convey each concept without spending ages and ages on each one.

I also recorded the process for each creature and made videos for my YouTube channel.

As you can see in the videos I started out by blocking in the shape for each creature with something called ZSpheres. I don’t always start like this but I thought it would work for these designs. I then used Dynamesh in a low resolution and increased the resolution when I wanted to increase details.

I didn’t want to go into the more technical process of retopology and UV mapping for these as they are only intended for concept art / Illustration use so I rendered them within ZBrush.

Sea Monster 1

Sea Monster 2

Sea Monster 3

Thanks for reading.