Zbrush Caveman

Well, it really has been a while since I posted anything. I've been really busy with other things. Including a very fun project - a book that my siblings and I put together for my parents, that I ended up being the compiler of, which included devising the bulk of the creative look for everyone's pages, which were all unique to each person (there are nine of us). It was a lot of work but thankfully I had my wife and Sister to draw on for help with the creative part, which they ended up playing a big roll in. Anyway, this post is not about that.

This piece is another Zbrush exercise. Again, I started only intending to do the head, but ended up taking it a little further. What you see here is probably about 7 to 8 hours of work (excluding experiments which did not contribute to the look of the sculpt). Notes: the dreads took a surprisingly long time, even with Zspheres. I'm also going to eventually swap out the dreads for more messy hair that would be more in keeping with the caveman idea that this is based on, namely the middle image, bottom row of this previous post:
http://fbbsketches.blogspot.com/2006/10/cavemandino-shortfilm-idea.html
Of course the original image is more cartoony, and a little more dumb looking. I may narrow the eyes on the current sculpt to bring back some of that dumb look. As for the rest - we'll see, I may just leave this where it is and move onto something else.

This project has served me well as a subject of experimentation. I thought I'd give the local sub-division approach another try. In the end I came to the same conclusion as before - nothing beats proper topology from the start. In the close up on the head you can see some puckering at the borders of areas that underwent local sub-d. This led however to learning the process of retopologizing a mesh in an external editor and reapplying the high-res details in ZB. So I did a quick low quality re-topo of some area's of the model where local sub-d had been used, and much tweaking and discovering of ZB quirks later:( - got it figured out. Anyway, for all to see - here you have it.