Art Spotlight: Slythe Bust

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

Hello Sketchfab community!

My name is Luis Melendez, I go by Wicked Designs. I am a self-taught artist from The Bronx.
For this model I decided to use Z brush exclusively in the interest of time. I decided to create it as part of a series of “Cartoon Villain” studies. I also made it as an homage to a cartoon popular in the late 1980’s called Thundercats. I tried to stay faithful to the original source material (Example).

For the main part of the bust I started with a polysphere with a low polygon count. I blocked out the main shape that I wanted then subdivided to sculpt the details. For the protruding portions like the ears and spikes I sculpted them as separate subtools also from spheres. I duplicated and positioned each part accordingly using Transpose and Subtool Master. I did the same for the eyes and teeth.

I used basic shapes to create the head gear. For the main part I used a polysphere tool at its lowest subdivision. With some vertices masked and symmetry applied I extruded faces with transpose. For the jewel I used ClipCurve to halve a sphere and placed it atop a flattened cylinder both at high polygon counts.

I turned on RGB channel and turned off Z Add to paint the model. I used Mask by cavity then inverted the mask and filled in with black on low intensity to accentuate crevices.

Finally to prepare the model for upload I merged all its subtools and fused them using Dynamesh. I then unwrapped the model using the UV Master Plugin.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed the overview of this workflow! Also, thanks to Sketchfab for providing a venue that allows 3d artists to showcase their work. Stay tuned for a retopologized version of this model and others.

Thanks Luis!

You can see more of Luis’ work here on Sketchfab.