Yr2 Week 10: High Poly Lions!

I spent most of this week modelling my high poly lion and exploring zbrush. I found the whole process to be quite fun and quite enjoy using zbrush, I am glad I have familiarised myself with it in advance so that I am able to have a little bit of a head start during the character project.

Below is my final high poly sculpt of my lion, I didn't include the accessories such as the pivot, base and barrel in the sculpt as I did not want to distort them at all whilst modelling around them, as I did not plan on changing these much. I tried to make the lion look semi-realistic but still stylised, taking into consideration the fact that it is a statue and has a floating head, it will never look completely realistic.

After I had completed my high poly sculpt, I used an alpha brush I created from a rock texture to add a little bit of texture and slight cracks to my lion, to make it look more as though it is made from rock and has been sculpted.

Below shows another image of the lion from a different angle with the texture brush added.

After I had finished the high poly sculpt, I created a normal map from the two using xnormal, I had tried using 3ds Max but this proved to be too tedious. The normal map adds quite a bit of extra detailing to the model, but I feel as though it still needs to be tweaked quite drastically in a few places to really highlight certain features.

Below shows a quick marmoset render of my high poly model, with all of the peices attached. The head seems to be slightly too high up due to the way zbrush flattened the mesh originally which I will need to go back and fix.

This image shows the comparison between my high and low poly models. Looking at my high poly model really makes me dislike my low poly model, but I am hoping that the normals will make a large difference and really bring the final model together.