Help with some organic modeling (animal heads, etc)

I have a month studying general concepts and techniques for blender. Now, I need to start modeling animal heads for Egypt Gods models. I’m importing the body from MakeHuman and changing the head. The thing is, I don’t know where to begin or which path is the best. I’ve been reading about sculpting and retopo, box modeling, multiresolution modifier with sculpting… There’s a lot of ways to make organic models, but I need to know which can be better for me, and how to start.

I’ll be doing stuff like a wolf head, an eagle head… animal heads like the ones of Ra or Seth, from the ancient egypt.

If anyone can help me to start, would be awesome!

first study the shape you want, and get some reference pics, then try to roughly replicate it with subsurf modelling, then sculpt then retopo.



Abuse the reference material you can find. And you can find quite a bit of good stuff on D-art when it comes to drawing animals. I would use that to supplement what research you can find on animal skull/body shapes. But it is a start.

I wouldn’t recommend doing anything with the makehuman head other than deleting it, the topology of a head mesh is a lot different from what you would need for a animalistic style head.
As for actually creating the types of heads you’re trying to make I would recommend searching for videos of people sculpting animal heads on youtube as there are a lot out there and you can learn a lot from watching other hobbists/professionals, and don’t limit yourself to only blender videos because the process for sculpting things is mostly the same across all programs aside from the user interface differences.

Thanks a lot!