Making of the Gargoyle by Shane Higgins, South Africa



As with most artworks one would start off with an idea or a concept sketch. As one can see it’s really the layout that I choose to follow, as my mouse drawing skills are much to be desired. With this in mind let’s go through the steps of creating the gargoyle.


Firstly, I start with creating the basic shape of the creature. I do this with a low poly and flip a smoother proxy to determine the detail that I want. Below is a typical example of how I created the gargoyle. Once I was happy with the proxy I duplicated the low poly cage, flipped, combined, merged and smoothed the two together.



The next step was to build the pillars and stand for the gargoyle. So again I started with a low poly and extruded faces until I had a shape of a pillar. To make the pillar more believable different faces were pull, pushed and scaled to give a more displaced shape. I then textured the pillar with a stonewall texture and displaced it more with a grayscale image of the same texture during texturing.