WIP: Sculpting the Night King in ZBrush - Part 1
A First Attempt at Likeness Sculpting
Hello again, fellow Steemians! I'm back again with a new post about my ongoing endeavour to develop proficiency in the art of 3D digital sculpting. Although this post follows the same theme of one I posted previously, this one is not a continuation of the first that was done in Blender. It is, rather, a similar effort of my endeavour to sculpt a character who captured my fascination at the time, and with ZBrush instead of Blender.
Likeness sculpting is, as it implies, digitally sculpting an exact or at least a near-exact copy of a character, mostly for TV/film, animation, or game production usage, or simply, as an art form in itself. Well aware of the fact that I am late in picking up this activity to develop this required skill at work, I am wasting no time, and practising whenever time permits. That means you'll be seeing many results of my efforts to develop this skill.
Some Progress Shots
This character needs no introduction at all, since many of you here are probably fans of the series, or even the novels. But, how I ended up choosing him as my first subject was probably influenced by my plan to sculpt Thanos, with the latter's ridged chin bearing some resemblance to the Night King's face.
Plus, since the Night King happens to look more "metal" than Thanos, and also more challenging to sculpt - think, better bragging rights when it's done - I guess that's why I ended up choosing him. It also helped that I got into sculpting shortly after the final episode of the series had aired.
The Video
This sculpt began life as just one of those daily warm-up or practice sculpts a beginner does everyday to gain proficiency. I didn't intend for it to be turned into a serious project and almost ended up being deleted.
But, a friend pointed out that I should save at least a few of my early efforts, and perhaps continue working on one of them so that I'd have an early work to look back on someday and see how far I've progressed.
Since this current incarnation of this video is made up of four smaller videos strung together, by looking at the history of this sculpt I've managed to identify the time stamps of each section.
00:00 to 01:33 - This is the original sculpt practice session and a Facebook post of it shows that it was created sometime in the middle of June.
01:33 to 02:50 - This section was added when I decided to continue working on this piece, and a saved video shows that it was created in August.
02:50 to 04:40 - Now, this part was done just last week.
04:40 to 06:02 - And this final segment was done just a day after the previous one.
It's a good thing that I was able to save this information so that I wouldn't have a hard time figuring it out later when this whole thing is done, and I would have to make a full final video out of all these small ones. I need to remind myself to rename them accordingly for easier identification of the files later on.
Houston, we have a problem....
No wonder I've been having a hard time with this character's proportions. Since I'm not a fan of the series, and have never watched a single episode of it, I was not aware that the role had been recast and a new actor portrayed him in the sixth season. And, the reference images I am using shows the two versions of the characters, as portrayed by the two actors. Good thing I decided to search again, and chanced upon an article about it. Now, I can finally finish this thing.
Ok, that's it for now. My workload is piling up like crazy, and some juniors are asking for something to do. I hope you enjoyed this little demonstration, and found it helpful in some way. Stay tuned for the second part which will show the completion of this little project. Thank you and God Bless!
The video above contains the following music tracks by TeknoAXE
and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
eSteem Surfer, ZBrush, and GIMP.
I'd been reading the books but hasn't actually watched a lot of the series and definitely not far enough to catch this character so it needed an image search. Looks like you're doing all right XD
I don't think I've ever done a sketch that was only intended as a warmup.
Oh, hello and thank you. I read somewhere that this character isn't in the novels, and was just created for the series.
But being aware now that there are two versions has made things a bit confusing. So I guess I will have to decide which version to create, and then delete all the other reference images I have of the one portrayed by the other actor.
And this is one of a few doodle/practice/warmup sculpts that I decided to save and continue working on, for posterity's sake.
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