Happy to share my latest piece of ZBrush/Keyshot art. This is a fan art piece for the video game “Darksouls 3” where you touch a skull goblet and encounter the “High Lord of Wolnir” bosss.
My goal was to create a real-life version of the skull goblet. I tried my best to keep true to the original design of the game-play model as well as the original concept, such as the placement and amount of stones set into the metal crown and base as well as the overall flow of the swirly design patterns. I did take a lot of artistic liberties with some of the overall proportions of the model, the swirl details, coloration of the gems, and also wanted to add some teeth to the skull which I thought looked really cool.
The base model was created in 3D Studio Max. All of the sculpting was done in ZBrush. Texturing was done using ZBrush, Knald and Photoshop. Materials and lighting were all done in Keyshot.
First image is a beauty render from keyshot with a screen shot from “Darksouls 3” environment for the game location in which you find the skull goblet.
A simple grey diffuse keyshot material applied to the skull to show the sculpting detail.
A creepy close up of just the skull. I released this on Halloween on my Facebook art page as I thought it was creepy.
A Grey shade keyshot render of the model.
Another beauty shot of the side of the model from keyshot with the background comped in from the video game. The game model did not have the glowing stones, but I thought it made the chalice feel more magical and eerie.
Here is a ZBrush Tutorial video I created showing how I sculpt the ornate swirls on my skull chalice crown.
A close up render of the skull sub-surface shader I created in Keyshot as well as a grey shade render. Also used some of Keyshot’s DOF camera settings for this to get an interesting blur effect.
Screen shots from ZBrush of the final model.
All angles of the model from ZBrush.
Close up renders of the teeth. Originally I did not create the roots of the teeth but later needed to since I had them revealing through the rotting portions of the skull.
Two reference images I gathered when creating my skull. Before I start any modeled I gather lots and lots of reference material and images.
This reference image also includes a version of the final concept that “FromSoftware” created. The side view of the skull I actually used as a displacement and later texture map for sculpting my model.
3D Print Progress - This is the first model I have ever created that I decided to 3D Print. Here you can see the final result of the 3D Print with a can of soup as reference for scale. The model is roughly 8 inches tall. Unfortunately I will not be able to sell these commercially since this is based on a design from a copyright video game. For me, it is a fun exercise, and I enjoy having this on my desk!
Comparison Keyshot renders of the front of the skull. Leftmost image is with some custom lighting, the middle image is with one HDRI light in Keyshot, and the right most grey shade render is a diffuse shader with one HDRI light.