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


Next up are the glasses. I want them to look retro, so I’ll make them from simple materials, like bronze and leather. I use a torus as the basic shape and continue from there, extruding my way to the final desired shape.




I then add divisions where I want sharp edges, especially on the metal parts.



To make the Zbrush work easier, I’ll split the glasses based on materials: bronze, leather and rubber.



High Res Modeling and Face Textures

Before I export all the parts to Zbrush, I double check for polygons with more than 4 sides. These can cause nasty problems when sculpting so avoid them at any cost.

I import each mesh in Zbrush 3.1 as a subtool. I use this feature as it allows me to import a lot of geometry into the scene. It’s a lot easier to split a very high-polygon model into lower resolution parts and work on each of them individually, which means better performance in Zbrush.




This is how the imported objects look in Zbrush. I import them one by one as subtool starting with the head.

So, the head is first! I gathered a pretty large collection of pictures of old people, wrinkles and other details. Google is my best friend! :-)

I won’t go straight into details yet. I’ll take the natural approach of doing the big shapes first. It’s very important to be aware of the skeleton and muscles that give the face its form. As the character is meant to be an ingame model, I’ll have to amplify some of the shapes.