Need input on tackling this new project

beansauce

Hi!

I fell in love with this image for the last week and decided to finally recreate it in 3D. My whole issue is how to go about the skull. How would you guys do it, Model the base skull and individually sculpt in the bricks via alphas in zbrush? If there was a procedural texture put on it I dont believe it would have that certain "flow" to it. I'm currently unaware of any method to take sculpted bricks and kind of, generate the skull shape using a skull model for reference. 

I'm just looking for ideas, so I'd like to know how YOU'D do it. 

Thanks in advance

Eric Chadwick

Model the in-game mesh of the skull. Create a tiling texture of bricks, and another of moss, and another of broken bricks. UV the bricks to the skull, then paint blends between the bricks/moss/broken textures. Add specific individual bricks along edges here and there to break up the silhouette, re-using the same textures.Then add vines, detail meshes, props, etc. 

Alex_J

*Essentially everything Eric Chadwick said, but here's my take anyway:

I wouldn't waste time sculpting bricks, stuff like that is way faster to do with materials and you'll get more flexibility that way too. There is so many tut's and freebie substance materials out there for bricks and mossy stone, I'm sure you could get a prototype of this setup pretty fast just to play around with to kind of figure a workflow out that suits your needs the best.

I'm not an environment guy, but I think I'd start by identifying the essential modular meshes and materials I'd need, develop a library with all the things in one scene, get the lighting more or less setup, and then start placing it all together. Then, when the major composition is setup, I'd start tinkering away with the extra things like rubble and vines. 

Quixel puts out some good breakdown youtube videos about creating landscape scenes in Unreal that I think may give you a lot to go on. 

Really cool art by the way, please share your final results!

beansauce

@Eric Chadwick

Thank you very much, I was overthinking it drastically. I'm trying to teach myself Substance during the course of this project as well, so going the tillable texture route works out. 

@BIGTIMEMASTER

Thank you for the input. Yeah I believe I could get a real nice prototype quickly with the freebie substance materials out there, but I'm trying to create my own just for portfolio reasons....and learning. That's usually my method before starting a project, but idk, I was just overthinking it. I will post my results, thanks again!

Alex_J

My intentiion for the quick prototype was just to give you a leg up on deciding if and how the approach could work for you, then of course you go back in and build everything yourself for the training/portfolio showcase. Given time and materials, it's always nice to take a dry run at things to learn "what you don't know" before you get into the real deal.

musashidan

As often happens with 2D concepts, they don't always translate well to 3D. This is where you have to make decisions that make sense for the asset in question(in a professional setting you would discuss this with the 2D artist)

In the case of this skull structure it makes absolutely no sense that the entire thing would be built out of bricks. Just because it's fantasy doesn't mean that it shouldn't be grounded in reality.

As this is a personal project you could explore artistic options and do a slight redesign. Maybe only have bricks where it makes sense. Create the structure as a hybrid of natural rock with brick sections as part of the design.

Also, from a technical point of view this would be a nightmare to unwrap whilst avoiding too many seams because of the distortion you'll encounter. Especially considering you'll be adding a very noticeable pattern in the brick texture's case.