I sculpted the general shape and proportions with the help of dozens of Carnotaurus skeleton reference images downloaded from the internet (Fig.04).


The good thing about this project was that I had constant feedback from a real paleontologist. So it was a real pleasure to reconstruct the dinosaur the way I felt and thought it should look, then receive valuable feedback from the professional. This was a great opportunity to learn and improve in that field.

Once I had nailed the Carnotaurus morphology and it was approved, it was the point in the process where I had to retopologize the mesh (Fig.05). I did this in ZBrush. Though this feature could still be massively improved, I've learned to appreciate it and have become quite fast at retopologizing meshes in ZBrush.


There are loads of great tutorials out there on the ZBrush Topology feature, but I will cover the basic premise behind it. To be able to retopologize anything you need to have a polymesh object, or any kind of object you can import into ZBrush. Edit Topology is best for sorting out and cleaning mesh objects that are created using ZSpheres, ZSketch, DynaMesh or basically any objects that have messy topology.

In the Subtools palette you need to click the Append button and select the default ZSphere object from the window. Now you need to select that ZSphere in the subtool layer and scroll down to the bottom of the Tool section to find the Topology palette. Then click Edit Topology (Fig.06).



You need to be in the Edit and Draw mode to be able to start retopologizing (Fig.07).