THE LEGS
13 BASIC SHAPE
I wanted to just jump right in and go wherever my whims took me, so I masked off the top of the torso cutoff that I got from Adam and used the Snake Hook brush with Sculptris Pro mode turned on. This let me simply pull out legs free-form from the hips. Then, I used Move, Inflate, Smooth and Clay brushes to flesh out the position and volumes a bit. As I worked, I had the impulse to make the legs into tree trunks, branches and roots, so I let the shapes be a little more ropey and sinuous.
14 ROCK FOUNDATION
Rather than make the leg trunks at the end of the foot just sit on the ground, I thought it would instead be cool if they were roots gripping a stone. So I inserted a primitive sphere with my plugin Ryan's Tools (available at gum.co/ryanstools) and made the surface faceted with my Crease brush (available in the Pro version of the plugin). Then I used Noise Makers to give the surface a rough, natural texture. Is the stone part of the character or is it a weight that he should do without? If I knew the answer to that, I would probably be a lot wiser.
15 PUT DOWN ROOTS
Next I wanted to grow roots around the rock so that it feels like the rock is tightly held in a root structure. I used the Curve Tube Snap brush with a modified shape curve so that it tapers to be narrower as it goes longer. I created lots of individual roots and then adjusted their positions with the Move and Move Topological brushes. Making the Accucurve brush setting be a steeper curve was very useful for getting sharper angles on the move pulls. Then I used Easymesh in Ryan's Tools to fuse the roots with the leg trunk.
16 SCULPT THE TREE
This was just plain-old clay sculpting fun. No special techniques, really. Just manually diving in with the clay brushes and putting organic twists, bulges, knots and other forms wherever I felt they were needed. I tried to mix up the shape language between human anatomy and tree-trunk forms. I let the toes of the right foot turn into carrot-esque roots. If you have ever grown your own carrots, you know they get pretty gnarly and are rarely perfect Bugs Bunny-grade spears. I also used the Snake Hook brush on that as well as a fresh sapling growing from the heel.
17 LEAF HANDS
Continuing with the mutant tree-human hybrid theme, I got the inspiration to put some leaves on the sapling that look eerily like human hands. I used my Ryan's Tools plugin to import an image as a Poly-painted plane, cut out the hand shape, sculpted leafy veins, duplicated, mirrored and fused the leaf to create one with thickness, used the Move brush to bend the shape a bit and turned it into a IMM brush so I could draw out copies onto the sapling branches.
18 ADD BARK TEXTURE
Finishing up, I wanted to make the legs feel like they were covered in tree bark. I found an alpha map online of tree bark and put it in a Dragrect brush and started stamping on texture. After that, I had a look around the model for anything that might need adjusting. I looked at the silhouette to see if I could amp up the forms for a more interesting pose. I looked for areas that lacked detail or interest. Finally, my time was up and I submitted it to the Corpse Crew for assembly.