Art Spotlight: Fleshy Priest

In Art Spotlight, we invite Sketchfab artists to talk about one of their designs.

Hey! I am Pieter Geusens and I am a student at Luca School of Arts. My main focus is 3D props and renders (mostly not animated). Most sculpting and rendering stuff is self taught so it probably does not follow a regimented workflow.

The Idea and Inspiration

For the idea I just started like I start most sculpts with just making a basic shape with a vague concept in mind.
I wanted to make a priest but when he is totally made out of meat, he ended up not looking a whole lot like a priest but hey…

Start

I started with a basic sphere in ZBrush and worked my way with the clay buildup brush to get the miter shape.

The main thing I looked at was a priest’s miter

Detailing

I never stick too long with the low-poly version and at this point I sub-divide a few times until I reach around 4 mil polygons.
Using the clay build up brush with focal shift on -50, I make most of the sculpt. This brush gives a very intestine-look, which I really liked.

Note that it might look too busy and not to good now but it will be very useful when doing the textures.

Texturing

All texturing happens in 3D Coat, pretty quickly. I made use of the smart material where you can make material appear on convex or concave surfaces, which expedites the process. I coupled this with some hand painted blood and teeth and he was ready to go.

Some last moment changes were done in Photoshop

Rig

I uploaded this model a few months ago without a rig/animation but it was not very nice and the lighting was very basic.
So I decided to rig it and re-upload it, the rig itself was kept very basic with 8 bones and autoweight with some tweaks.

Sketchfab

I love Sketchfab because it gives you a fast and easy way to tweak a lot of stuff and without Sketchfab, I would never have thought of animating this character.

The textures are all very glossy to give it a wet feeling, which goes well with the small animation because then you see all the wrinkles on the surface. The only maps used are normal and base color maps. For post-processing filters I gave it SSAO to make the slits on his face pop more. In order to add to the fore, I find that depth of field on blood also works well for creepy stuff. I also tweaked a lot of the tone mapping and color balance to get the right feeling.
Thank you!