Preparation

To begin the work I created a rough concept in MS Paint. Unfortunately I deleted that “stunning” piece of art so I can't show it to you. I went from the rough concept on to collecting references of snakes. After a while, I narrowed the search to Reticulated Pythons because I found them the most beautiful and charming of all the snakes I researched. They are quite interesting animals and that made collecting references more fascinating.Some of the interesting facts I discovered are that they belong to one of the biggest species and can reach up to 10m in the wild and up to 7m in captivity. (One python I read about, named “Fluffy,” reached this size.)

And although they are cold blooded animals, they incubate their eggs. They raise their temperature by shivering their body. Also, they have pits around their lips that look like additional nostrils and are for infrared sight. And they have a snorkel at the bottom of their inner mouth so they can still catch breath while swallowing something that is bigger than their mouth.

These are some of the sites where I found the most useful references:
www.stevegooch.com ; www.countrysideconstrictors.com/retics.asp ; www.retic.org ; forums.bobclark.com

Modeling the Snake

To model the snake I used Wings. At the beginning of this stage I gave different colors to the polygons so that I could distinguish which scale, or group of scales, they belong to. I did not use image planes in the viewport, but I did always keep a photograph of a python open in a side window. Click to Enlarge modeling steps

"Later in ZBrush this base mesh turned out to be quite problematic because the polygons were not regular enough and there are a few triangles. For that reason I can’t say I recommend modeling too many details in a mesh that is supposed to be sculpted later."

Modeling the mouse

I modeled the mouse in Wings as well. I’m able to show you detailed step by step slides of the creation of the model of the mouse because I saved the scenes to a new file once per hour.