Most of my time went into working on the cervical and dorsal vertebrae and the ribs. I wasn't initially planning on sculpting these at all. I usually treat the cervical, dorsal and caudal vertebrae as very simple structures, using a primitive forms to represent the general size and shape of the rib cage, and vertebrae. I used to cringe at the idea of having to sculpt each vertebrae individually, especially considering that I was going to cover it all with muscle and skin anyway.
However I came across a couple cool techniques, thanks to Ryan Kingslien and his Artistic Anatomy in Zbrush course at Uartsy. He had a process that made sculpting the vertebral columns and ribs in humans seem very manageable. I decided to try and apply the techniques I learned to my skeleton of Pachycephalosaurus. There were some adjustments I had to make to get everything to work correctly, and as I said it still took a good chunk of time to get everything in place, mostly because dinosaurs have many more vertebrae than humans do. In the end, I was able to tackle the vertebrae and ribs without having my head explode which is a really good thing.
I may decide to take this further and make the skeleton it's own sculpture, or I may stop working on the skeleton and begin focusing on a flesh reconstruction. I'm not too sure at the moment so I guess we'll see where it goes from here.
