Making of 'Demon' by Emanuel Palalic

Doom character artist Emanuel Palalic shares his ZBrush workflow for his Demon model

Hey what's up guys! I will guide you through some of the techniques I used to make this monster demon dude thing. It will mostly be ZBrush stuff with a little 3D Coat and Marmoset sprinkled in too.

Inspiration

I am greatly inspired by the work my coworkers at id Studios and they have taught me tons of things. You should definitely check out Jason Martin, Bryan Wynia, Denzil O'Neil, and Efgeni Bischoff. They've got some awesome work and really good tutorials out there!

Blocking in the face

In ZBrush I usually start off with the Move, ClayTubes and DamStandard. I work with a pretty low subdivision level at first and I work my way up. I'm also pretty messy in the beginning trying to find the shapes and lines that I like. ClayTubes is used for the bigger shapes and the DamStandard is used to add some lines.

Finding shapes in the face

Finding shapes in the face

Blocking in the armor

Still using the same three brushes as Step 1 – but only using two separate SubTools for this armor, one for the plating around the neck and one for everything else. I tried to keep the face lines in the in the back of my mind when designing the armor. All of the spikes and plates kind of follow and point to those lines to create implied lines within the sculpt. I also introduced little bumps here and there as I wanted to introduce some patterns to lead the viewer's eye around the sculpt.

Figuring out plating

Figuring out plating

Bone plating

I just used the Move brush to block in the basic shape to get an idea of what the plating silhouette will be like. I used the ClayTubes to: add in the actual plates, subtracting from these plates to create some concave areas, and to create sharper edges within the plating, creating subtle lines to give some directionality within the plate itself, and creating little knobs. Then I used the DamStandard to separate the plating some more and sharpening edges. I subdivide and repeat everything above Use Move to exaggerate it in some places, and using DamStandard to create little bumps, holes, and sharpening edges. I try to bring holes to areas of focus, and using bumps on top of ridges, also used bumps to create implied lines.

Process for how I created the plating

Process for how I created the plating

The pearly whites

I just duplicated the head SubTool, sculpted in a base for the teeth, selected the teeth, deleted hidden for everything else. I did this for both the bottom and top rows of teeth, so the teeth are just two SubTools.

Blocking in teeth

Blocking in teeth

Refining the face

At this point I went back and started to make sense of the shapes in the face; as with most of this sculpt I used the ClayTubes and DamStandard brushes, but I also made a mask using Cavity and Inflate on the folds. Still trying to keep a flow to the sculpt, so some folds and wrinkles are actually kind of just there to guide you throughout.

Refining shapes in face

Refining shapes in face

Detailing

I changed the shape of the head to match the flow I was going for earlier. I use the DamStandard for wrinkles along with the Inflate brush in certain instances. I masked them using Cavity and Inflate to give wrinkles and folds volume. I also used the Standard brush, using alpha 58 with a spray for some of the other skin details. I went back over these to mask by Cavity and Inflate over this as well. Then I just used the Standard brush at its default settings for the bumps and veins on the face. With the bone I pretty much subdivided and kept repeating the steps I listed in the bone plating section. Then I went through and stamped some alphas. I really liked using the vm_fine_dirt01 alpha, which can be found here. I really liked using this one since it had some directionality to it.

Detailing process for skin and bone

Detailing process for skin and bone

Chest orb

Nothing special really for the orb, it is just an elongated sphere; most of the detail work was done in 3D Coat and applied as an overlay to the Normal map. I duplicated this sphere, shrunk it just a tad and then sculpted in the veins, to keep them as separate SubTools.

Adding the vein on orb

Adding the vein on orb

Maggots

I quickly sculpted a kind of maggoty looking thing then duplicated it and stacked it on itself. I then NanoMeshed the maggots into the spots I wanted them with variation on the rotations and offsets along with random distribution turned up a bit.

Placing maggots in crevices

Placing maggots in crevices

Rendering

The render of the sculpt was super quick out of ZBrush. I exported out a high quality preview render to use as the base. Then I did a BPR render and exported out the shadow pass. This was multiplied overtop the high preview base in Photoshop. I also set up a different light to use as rim light, BPR rendered that separately and exported it out. In Photoshop I used levels on this to make sure it had super high contrast and then set it as a Color Dodge overtop everything. Lastly I just added another levels overtop the whole comp and tweaked it to have the range I wanted it to have.

Quick way to present sculpt

Quick way to present sculpt

Texturing

I did all of the texturing in 3D Coat. I started off with just the overall color. Then I went through and started working on the materials themselves. I really like all of the masking features in 3D Coat; I'm also a huge fan of its smart materials which I used for wear, dirt, and other things like that to use as a base. The blood and other juices on this guy were made by using stencils in 3D Coat. I took some splat and drip textures from textures.com and turned them into masks. Loaded them in as stencils and just painted drips and splats onto the mesh.

Before and after blood stencils and dirt/wear smart materials

Before and after blood stencils and dirt/wear smart materials

Eyes

There is something I like doing with eyes in Marmoset that I think some of you may find kind of cool. My eyes usually have three layers: the first is a sphere with all of the Diffuse, Parallax, and Normal map info in it, second is a wetness layer, and lastly a layer that I use to fake caustics in the eye. This layer is transparent and set to additive. I bake a normal of a concave shape into it so that the Specular highlight mimics a caustic like effect. I set the Specular color to a color close to that of the iris, or whatever it's being used on. I also usually set the pupil to black in the spec or mask it out in the alpha.

How to fake caustics in eye with marmoset

How to fake caustics in eye with marmoset

The untextured model

The untextured model

<h5>The finished model</h5>

The finished model

Related links

To see more of Emanuel's work head over to his website
Get your copy of Photoshop for 3D Artists – volume 1 here
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