Drinking mech-skull

Startin' a new Personal Project based on an illustration by Ninja Jo, such a great artist.

I fell in love with her robot concepts so I took the opportunity to strenghten my hardsurface skills both in modelling and texturing. I'm realizing this image to test Pavlovich's no-UV workflow across Zbrush and Substance Painter but eventually I'm plannig to make it even a game-ready model.

The original illustration by Ninja Jo.

I've found it on Instagram but you can also check her amazing artworks at https://www.artstation.com/ninja_jo

Here is the first stage, I focused mainly to match up the proportions giving a quick overall view. Nothing fancy, just blocking out principal forms and a hints of detail. Using a real skull as a reference turned out very useful as the differnt bones are reflected in different metal plates of the illustration. Even if I kept her draw on the             z-plane, skull anatomy helped me a lot to correctly understand proportions.

In the second stage I added a couple of shapes palceholders so I could have a better idea of where I was going.

Then I focused mainly to the secondary shapes of the head. I cleaned it a little by subdividing it in polygroups, which will be very handy when it will come to model the tertiary shapes, and I obtained a better topology using zremeshers by groups.

After sculpting those main shapes of the head I moved on to the body, starting to add some other meshes and placeholders: I try not to focus too long on one single part as I want to maintain an overall lok over the model. I also added colors, this helped me a lot to visualize the final result and to understand the correct interpolations between different areas.