I’m still practicing with ZBrush so I made a Rhino.
Since I’m morally committed to turn everything I do into something that could fit into a fantasy game or a Sci-Fi movie, I made it anthropomorphic, angry and, most importantly, wearing an armour.

I’m getting the hang of it. And I learned two important things during the process.
The first one is that it’s all about geometry. I know: duh!
Even in something “free hand” like ZBrush, if your geometry sucks then every detail you try to carve on it will suck too.
To be precise, as a rule of thumb the more your geometry sucks the more your sculpture will suck as well. Easy to remember.

The second thing I learnt is that I’ll never be a good sculptor, not to mention a modeller. Thing is, I can be bothered with geometry only so much. If a task will require an awful amount of polygon-pushing, the creation of too many ZBrush sub-tools or anything technical to force me out of actual sculpting for more than a minute I’ll just leave it.
Like, I’ll literally go “fuck it, I’ll do something else”.

Now, back to my Rhino.

As I said, I’m still practicing. So I though that something with a big head  and limbs, and maybe a chunky outfit, would have been easier to sculpt than, say, a small tiny fairy with wings made of moonlight and spider webs.
Hence the armour. I know, it looks like it’s made out of a stove. It’s intentional.

I definitely messed up his hands. I’ll post them here just because I have no shame.

I was almost tempted to remove them and sculpt them from scratch, then I thought “who cares, I’ll draw them later. I can draw hands”.
The last stage (after I’ll be finished with his legs) will be to pose him and use him in a couple of illustrations.

I don’t know yet if I shall light the scene in Maya and take that as a reference, or maybe use some other technique.
Like painting over a screen-grab of the rhino and keep the occlusion map on a separate layer, in order to have some crisp shadows.

The super cool thing is that, once you have something modelled, you can use it in a lot of different positions (most of which potentially very difficult to draw) or in many instances of the same thing. Like an army of armoured angry fucking rhinos.
We’ll see.

by Paolo Puggioni