Alien Gargoyle

thingiverse

I began sculpting in ZBrush with a clear idea of what my first creation should be - a monster from the start. Humans are notoriously tricky to replicate, with their slightly skewed proportions often resulting in a zombie-like appearance. So, I decided to skip right over humans and focus on something more complex. My choice was an alien gargoyle, a design that would prove much more challenging than anticipated. The bio-mechanical Giger-esque style required advanced techniques like the insert mesh brush, which is typically used for more straightforward subjects. The original alien gargoyle design was created by David Lindsay of Stoneworks in 1993. You can see his original design and some sketches on his company's webpage: https://www.stoneworks.scot/gallery Additionally, there's a background story about this particular gargoyle: https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/970619/riddley-scott-stonemason-behind-mystery-alien-gargoyle/ I started sculpting in ZBrush based on these images, but unfortunately, the version I was using at the time required dynameshing everything together to have a single 3D-printable hull. Dynamesh creates massive mesh defects, particularly with structures like ribbed hoses that Giger liked to include in his designs. I had a lot of work fixing many of these defects and finally managed to fix them to a level where Slic3rPE would accept the print file. The alien gargoyle was printed on a Prusa i3 MK3 using silver PLA. Supports were, of course, necessary, and if you can print soluble supports, it really pays off in this case. Unfortunately, I couldn't use them, so I had to spend some time cleaning up the support structures.