Sculpting a Dark Souls-Inspired Body Horror-Style Character with ZBrush

Introduction

Hello 80 Level, and thank you for having me again :) My name is Franck Besançon, and I’m a freelance 3D Concept Artist specialized in body horror, based in France. I came into 3D fairly late, after spending about twenty years in advertising and communication, working in motion design. Since 2021, I’ve been spending all my free time in ZBrush, sculpting and imagining horrors. I’m self-taught (huge thanks to everyone posting tutorials on YouTube, you’re the best).

I’ve had the honor of working on about ten games, including Silent Hill: Townfall, Hellraiser Revival, Animal Use Protocol, Ghost Photographers, and a handful of indie titles. I’ve also worked on five films, including Altar for A24.

And I’d like to take a moment to salute my sculpting club, the Hellfire Sculpting Club. You’re all incredibly inspiring, and growing together both as artists and as a club has been the best part of this journey since I started!

Here’s one of my latest works, Spillage. I’ll explain how I made it, from the initial idea to the final image.

Concept + Sculpting

The core idea was simple: I wanted to make a very, very long sword :) And I wanted to break away a bit from my usual compositions, which are often portraits, and try something horizontal.

I was aiming for something in the spirit of Dark Souls, an intimidating, mysterious, majestic boss. I’ve always loved the way FromSoftware mixes grandeur and fragility, that sense of faded glory they give their characters.

So I started with the sword, since it was going to drive the whole composition. Then I sculpted the character wielding it. It’s a fairly simple sculpt, I used ClayBuildUp, DamStandard, and Move – the usual tools. I used the Sculptris mode to work quickly. For this character, I didn’t add much detail because I knew the body would appear quite small in the final image.

The idea of having guts/tentacles wrapping around the blade came to me very quickly. It felt like a strong way to connect the weapon and the character. That way, the sword wasn’t just a weapon anymore; it became an extension of the character.

Then I asked myself how it would function in-game, even if it was just for an illustration. I like there to be a certain logic in my chaos :)

The character is meant to fight, so they need protection. I wanted to have armor on one side only. One side attacks with the sword, the other needs to be armored, to be protected the time to close the distance with the player before striking. It also helped me introduce some asymmetry and draw more focus to the sword and the tentacles. That vertical line of armor breaks the diagonal of the sword in the composition, which helps with visual balance.

At that point, I had the character almost ready, but how could I fill the space and make the image stronger? I decided to really lean into the long line formed by the sword and frame it with a wall. That helped anchor the scene and gave me a very... sharp composition.

Coming back to it the next day, I still liked the structure of the image, but something was missing. The blank wall felt weak. I tried carving cavities into the stones, graves, and corpses, but it created too much visual noise and weakened the graphic strength of the sword.

Extending the tentacles to fill the space felt like the obvious solution as it reinforced the fusion between the wielder and the weapon. So I just used a whole bunch of simple tubes in ZBrush and the move tool to adjust and interlace them. It also brings visual noise, but this time in the right way; it completes the story and follows the line of the composition.

Render Phase

Then I bring everything into KeyShot. I don’t do any texturing or polypainting. I use custom materials in KeyShot that rely on a curvature node to generate detail. I manage the polygon density of my sculpts with that in mind, as it gives me control over where I want more detail. It’s a part of my usual workflow.

During the rendering phase, I set up the lighting: a bright daylight HDRI, a few spotlights, and a bit of .vdb smoke to create depth and background.

And as often happens, a happy accident. I removed the top wall to check something… and it looked better without it.

It gave more strength to the tentacles, opened up the image, and shifted it from something suffocating to something more mysterious. So I went with it. Like many people, I often start with a clear idea, but the creative process tends to find its own path; it’s how it works :) I like simple things, and very often, just removing one element makes an image stronger.

Finalizing the image was rather straightforward: one render with a fleshy material, one with a blood-like material, then I brought it all into Photoshop and touched up some details. 

Final Thoughts

I’m happy with the final result. I know I’m not the best sculptor out there, so I try to make up for it with original designs and strong compositions. You cannot learn everything, so I think it’s important to know your strengths and what sets you apart from others, and to do everything you can to trace your own path in that direction. 

Advice to Beginners

To showcase your creations, I think it’s important to think about framing and composition from the very beginning. I see a lot of young 3D artists adding tons of details, turning their models around in every direction, and in the end, they struggle to frame them and convey their concepts properly – arms overlap, the silhouette gets messy, and hard to read. Even though it’s 3D, if it’s not animated, it’s still just an image. And the best way to make your work stand out on social media is to frame it well :)

Look at classical paintings, plan for margins and breathing space. Negative space is a strong form of contrast; it lets you guide the viewer’s eye exactly where you want it to go.

And one last piece of advice: be bold! Have fun, let your instinct guide your hand. There’s already too much that looks the same, so look at what’s out there, and then do something else, something that feels personal. Whether it’s in sculpting subjects, composition, or rendering, people are drawn to originality. Trust me, being authentic and finding your own path will pay off.

Thank you!

Franck Besançon, Concept Artist