My a few months back other half went on a family/hunting trip back to his home in South Africa, he and his dad brought me back some horns from a Springbok and a Rooibok. Looking at the Rooibok skull I decided it would be a good idea to try sculpting it as I have a model in front of me to rotate and see all the aspects of.
To start with I started playing around with the interesting materials Sculptris provides and settled on this bone colouring instead of the red i had previously used. Unlike with eh wolf skull I could see more on this sculpt using the white rather than the red. I guess it pretty much comes down to what shape your sculpting is that gives the best highlights to help.
So one of the biggest problems I started with was getting the horns to extend without having the flat tearing issue I've experienced before, so it was a slow process extending the blob then inflating it so it would keep a shape, got their in the end with a rough shape, you can see right at the tip of the horns its starting to get that slight error to it which i need to fix. I manged to get the basic shape down pretty quickly this time.
The only thing to be aware of the skull I'm working from isn't uniform - half of the faceplate is cut off on the left side - but because of how the sculpting program works it works symmetrically along that central line so its not something I can fix until the very end of the sculpt as once you turn the symmetry off you wither cant turn it back on or it just can ruin stuff - I cant recall which happens off the top of my head right this minute.
Next step was to roughly mark out by inflating where the ridges on the horns started to go and then bulk them out later on.
So after another few evenings it now looks something like this:
So I fiddled around with the angles and fixed the overall shape of the skull itself, attempting to make it flatter as you can see I went a bit too far with the flattening tool but I'll fix that later on at some point. I continued along with the horn ridges and inverting the inflate tool to help create the slip where the skull and horns attach separately. Inverting the controls is an amazing feature to play around with it really helps creating the definition you need.
Thankfully the horn ridges tapper off just after curving round, I was dreading the idea of working on the thinnest section just in case I tore through the shape.
I think overall so far with this model I haven't encountered that many problems or issues just yet, I think the next challenge will be working on the underside of the skull - making it into a shell basically - as this has to be shaped in such a way I'm worried it might in inadvertently affect the stuff I've done to the top side but we'll see when I come back to it. I got weighed down with some other stuff so I put it to one side at the moment but like the wolf skull its something I'll be coming back to to finish off as I don't want to leave these unfinished.
Overall defiantly feeling comfortable with the program itself, I just need to sit down and learn to refine the models and details some more.
To summarize:
- Continue to play around in the Sculptris program
- Create and work on a basic model with access to physical reference material
- Learn techniques to take onto the next model - mostly inverting
- Go back and learn tutorials / lessons to improved and develop on model for a future date
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