Making of the Steam Master - Next-Gen Game Headby Sorin Lupu



I usually use a generic head made earlier. For now I’m not interested in details and anatomical features, I’m more concerned about the general proportions of the head.

I won’t go too much into details unfortunately as it takes a lot of time to go through this stage step by step.Therefore, I’ll concentrate on the general aspects of getting the natural proportions of the head right. I use lots of anatomical reference and photographs when working and so should you. Even if you have your own concept for a particular character, the subtle details require photographic reference.


On this particular model the ears are not visible so I won’t pay too much attention to them. Same goes for the neck area. This is good, because I can concentrate on the face and the shape of the head.



I use a flat black shader (Surface Shader in Maya) to check the silhouette. After I’m happy with it, I move on to modeling the hood. As the hood is shaped by the head, I start the hood’s geometry by extracting a part of the head I modeled earlier. One very important thing is that the hood should retain the initial head’s topology so there won’t be any problems at the seams, especially since the part of the head that’s not visible will be deleted.




I’ll give the head a basic cylindrical UV and then use the Unfold command to improve it. Later I’ll texture it in Zbrush using the Image Plane and Projection Master.