Sculpting & Texturing Venom Using ZBrush & Substance 3D Painter

Introduction

My name is Soufiane Idrassi, I'm from Meknes, Morocco. Currently, I am working as a Senior Concept Artist at Parallax Creative. I’m self-taught, I learned everything I know online, and I started way back in 2009. I worked on a bunch of stuff from small to big projects. The most notable ones are Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Secret Headquarters, The Electric State, and Dune: Prophecy. As for the games, I worked on PUBG Mobile and League of Legends.

Getting Started

In terms of personal work, I always make things that interest me at the moment. For this one, I saw the Venom movie poster by accident, and it made me want to sculpt my version of the character. As for references, I used the movie design as the main style but tried to incorporate elements from the comics, like the shape of the eyes, for example.

The Workflow

Sculpting

For this project, I decided to start from a sphere and build all the shapes from there using primarily DynaMesh. The shoulder symbiot was made using ZSpheres. As for the teeth, I preferred to have full control of them, so instead of using IMM brushes, I sculpted one tooth and manually duplicated it and slightly changed each, using the Move brush; the rest is sculpting details. When the sculpt was done, I did a quick ZRemesher and projected the details back into the new mesh.

UV Mapping

Next, I loaded up the model in Maya. I assigned a material to each mesh and did some quick UVs. It’s important that each mesh that has its own material needs to be UVed separately because that will allow us to have higher resolution textures later on. Since this model is not made for production, using auto UVs in Maya does the job just fine.

Texturing

Now that the model is prepared for texturing, we will jump to Substance 3D Painter. After loading the model, we have separate UV sets for each material we created in Maya. For the textures, I used Feverish Skin Default Smart Material as a base, and from there, I adjusted the colors and played with some Roughness layers using smart masks to get some more wetness in some areas and even more in cavities. The same process was used on all meshes with color adjustments.

Pose & Final Stages

Before we jump to rendering, we need a pose. For that, I loaded the model back into ZBrush and did a quick pose using masks. In Marmoset Toolbag, the process is rather straightforward. First, it involves finding a good camera angle. The reason I like to use Marmoset is because of how quickly you can set up good lighting. For this one, I used a studio HDRI, turned down the brightness, and by clicking on the HDRI, we can add lights around the model easily. From there, play with the light until you get the desired look you’re looking for.

And finally, proceeding to Photoshop and adding a background and some post-processing effects like bloom, film grain, and chromatic aberration. Our image is done.

Conclusion

It took me around eight hours from start to finish. I don’t think I have a favorite part because I enjoyed making this throughout the whole process, but if I had to choose, I would say the rendering part. It was rather hard to find a lighting setup that showed the forms of Venom due to the fact that there is so much going on in the sculpt, and I didn’t want everything to look like noise.

One of my favorite tutorials that is similar to this but more in-depth is Organic Sculpting by Arsen Asyrankulov.

Soufiane Idrassi, Senior Concept Artist