Hello everybody! My name is Luca Nemolato, and I'm a 21 year old Italian artist, currently working in Los Angeles as a concept artist at the Aaron Sims Company. In this Making Of Falling Skies: Alien Head Designs I will show you the process I used in order to create these concepts I did at the Aaron Sims Company for the second season of the TV show Falling Skies. It was a really fun show to work for, so I really enjoyed designing aliens for it. In this tutorial I will focus on the modeling and texturing process, as this covers most of what I did on this concept.

When creating a concept, the first step for me is to collect some reference pictures from around the web. I don't usually have time to sketch my concept on paper or in Photoshop, so I usually start my concepts directly in ZBrush. In order to be able to do so, I need to collect ideas in my mind while I'm searching my references, and when I have at least the 60% of the design in mind, I start to sculpt.

I always try to take reference from reality, since this will make my works more realistic and believable. My main references for this image were photos of a bat face, that I really used in order to create the creature's weird nose, and, of course, I used human referencse for the overall shapes and anatomy (Fig.01).

Modeling

I started to sculpt this concept in ZBrush using a base mesh that I'd created for other concepts I'd done for this show. For the sculpting process I usually use just a few brushes such as the Standard, Clay, Claytubes, Move and Dam_Standard brushes. I think that using the least amount of tools you can makes the sculpting process easier, faster and more realistic too, since I like to make my digital sculpting experience close to what I would do with real clay (Fig.02).