Concept

This alien baby was an old idea, which I first sculpted with clay five years ago. The clay sculpture was now a good reference for this 3D project – in fact, it was the only reference (Fig.01)!

Base Mesh

The base mesh was done in ZBrush 3.1 with ZSpheres. This is a fast way to get basic meshes for biological forms. As the mesh was so basic, I had to modify it in 3ds Max. I extruded some parts like the fingers and the shoulder bones, which is easily done in Max. I also added some new splines to the mesh. This is important in some mesh areas where the faces are too big; you have to be careful to get a steadily going mesh (Fig.02).

T-Pose

Back in ZBrush, the alien got six mesh subdivisions, and I started sculpting all the details. I used mostly the move and standard brushes at this point (Fig.03).



After the main details were finished, I exported the lowest mesh division to make the UVs. Of course it's possible to generate the UVs in ZBrush, but I wanted to get maps that I could easily modify in Photoshop later if necessary.
When you export a low poly-mesh from ZBrush and later re-import back to ZBrush with new UVs, it is very important to switch off the UVs in the tool rollout bar, otherwise you get a broken mesh (Fig.04)!