The Minotaur

This is my own take on the Minotaur of the ancient greek myths. He’s another character for my personal story.

Background

The Orcs rarely seem to be in need of help; specially when it comes to fighting, they’re more brutal than you can imagine.

But when they’re in serious trouble, the only one able to lend a hand, is the great Minotaur. The enemy of you enemy is your friend, right? Together they can safely evade the assanination attempted by the Argonians, on the Orc boss.

Nothing’s more important than water in a water-short planet crowded by a handful of mean creatures. The Argonians realised that before others, but thanks to the Minotaur, they failed to claim the Orcs’ resources.

Design

I wanted him to be sort of a manipulated human-being, didn’t really want him to be ultra-fantasy. So I made my art-direction decisions based on that fact.

Although I changed a couple of them along the way later. Thought he’d be better with one of his horns broken (to break the symmetry) and removed the rope (since I wasn’t really happy with that in general, and honestly, didn’t find any use for it).

And he’s meant to be around 7.5 feet tall.

Sculpting Process

I created this one using ZBrush, Maya, and Photoshop.

I started off by a custom base mesh I created in Maya, which I use for most of humanoid characters. It’s always good to make sure that the base mesh’s UV’s are done properly in a 3D package like Maya (or whatever you’re comfortable with). It will become handy later.

The details are mostly handsculpted, though a couple of alphas was used to make it look better.

I rendered it using ZBrush. Just created a couple of renderpasses and composed them in Photoshop.

For higher resolution images, please visit my Artstation.