I recently re-read many of H.P Lovecraft’s more famous works and after visiting, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” I was inspired to create a portraiture of someone showing the later stages of their transformation. This is the result:

Click here to view the high resolution image

Zbrush, Maya, and Photoshop were my weapons of choice. I created the base head using zspheres and all the other accessories started as cubes in Maya. I used the GoZ feature to quickly get them in the scene in the correct scale to the head.  Here are some early wip (work in progress) shots that show a bit of my process

early stage of sculpting

defining the major details

polypainting progress

I decided to go for a still image so I didn’t have to worry about poly count and I could just let myself have fun without worrying about technical constraints. I also decided to try a new method of rendering out multiple passes and layering them in photoshop. This allowed me to tweak them individually which gave me an amazing amount of control over the final image.

I also modeled some addition props such as a brooch, and a pendant, but unfortunately I didn’t feel like they added anything so I left them out. They are supposed to resemble some of the strange golden jewelry the citizens of Innsmouth would receive from Dagon and his Deep Ones.

Here is a brief tutorial I put together on how I achieved the final results.