Mechanical Skull – Michael Pavlovich

In this series we go over how to create a mechanical skull, from reference images to high res to game res to baking and rendering!
We start by using 2D reference to help us make a gorilla skull in ZBrush, turn that into a mechanical version using a variety of techniques, from sculpting to SubD modeling, booleans, alphas, and more! From there we create a “game res” showing a variety of overlapping techniques using ZBrush, Maya, and HeadUs (although most techniques are transferable to your 3D package of choice). While doing this we discuss best practices for UV seams and vertex costs, balancing fidelity with optimization, and finally end up in Marmoset Toolbag to discuss baking mesh maps.

From there we head into Substance Painter, where we show off the built-in UV and baking capabilities there, discuss a number of Painter basics, material instances, SSS, Emissive, post effects, and finally creating our final image using the built-in IRAY renderer. Next, we’ll discuss setting up custom exports in Painter, create one to export our files out of Painter, then import everything into Marmoset for another rendering option. Finally, we’ll export out of Painter straight into SketchFab, and set up our sharable 3D file there!

This is a really fun series to get in there and have some fun creating in ZBrush, and brush up on some basics to get it optimized for a real time engine!