Finishing Your Model
The following list represents some of the edits made to this sculpture to bring it to completion:
• Added the tear duct to the eyes. These little details are extremely important, even on a stylized eye such as this.
• Raised the ears higher on the head to give a more feline appearance.
• Increased the slope in toward the jaw and pulled the side curls out at an angle. While I made these edits I was looking for a visually pleasing stylization to the lines in the head and hair. The gesture of the curves implied by the mane leads your eye in a figure-8 around the sculpture.
Creating a 2.5D Pixol Illustration
At this stage, the basic sculpture of the lion’s head is complete, but so much more is possible here. If you would like to see how this sculpture is incorporated into a 2.5D illustration—with additional details like a backing plate and with the door textured and stained—please see the DVD for a PDF file that continues this project as an illustration (Figure 1.43). I encourage you to look at this material since ZBrush is a powerful illustration tool and many of its sculpting techniques are built on this foundation.
Figure 1.43 By sculpting the lion head knocker as a 3D object and combining it with canvas elements, you can create a complex scene.
These techniques are useful to the digital illustrator as well as when conceptualizing a character with ZBrush. Even though you can export your work to external renderers for animation and rendering, I wanted to show the power of ZBrush as a rendering and illustration tool in itself. These are often overlooked aspects of the program, but they are powerful tools to have in your arsenal even if you never do 2.5D illustration. Many of these tools are usable on 3D models in Edit mode using the Projection Master script. Projection Master will allow you to blend 3D sculpting with the 2.5D tools to create highly detailed models for export to other applications.
