Decapitated Monster Head

Monster head from my Witcher animation project from university. I based the design of several monsters from the Witcher 3 to come up with my own. I sculpted it from a sphere in ZBrush, altering the design as I went,, there were a few iterations. I knew I would make the production version from the concept sculpt. This is my first creature sculpt. The weird mouth and gum design came from a skull like Gwent card monster, in hind sight, anatomically it doesn’t made sense.

The model was retopologised in Maya and I projected the details onto the production mesh before finalizing it. It was textured in Substance Painter and shaded in Arnold.

In the animation, the monster is killed off screen by Geralt as per his contract with a mysterious client. The head is brought back as a trophy, the client hoped that this beast would best Geralt but when they see Geralt succeeded, they decide they must kill him themselves.