Sculpting the Pumpkin

 Getting the main shape of the pumpkin was not difficult, considering that I have done it before, and also having the explanations provided by Katarina. I decided to stay true to my reference image and make the pumpkin longer. At this stage, while masking where the cutouts were going to be, I also took into consideration where the metal part was going to be. 

Using the extract tool I was able to get the cutouts, but I did encounter some problems, and I had to go back and polish my masking since the extraction had made some artifacts. Also, I was having problems with some holes in the mesh that have appeared, but I was able to fix it using dynamesh and then zremesh afterward. 

At this stage, I have decided to use the same tool to achieve the metal bit of the pumpkin on top of what I already had. Due to the cutout of the mouth, I had to move the metal bit a little to the right because extruding it right by the corner was creating lots of problems. 

I decided to keep the metal part of the pumpkin and the organic one as two different subtools, to make the detailing process easier. I will be retopping them as one object when it comes to that though. Adding the surface details and refining the shape was a very fun process, using different brushes and alphas to achieve the desired look, while also keeping in mind what kind of materials these are. Some examples would be the standard brush, trim dynamic, dam standard.

For the handle and the metal eye, I have decided to start in 3dsmax, because it is easier to do sharped-edged shapes in there. I appended them to my model in zbrush, subdivided them a few times and then added the surface details. 

Thinking about retopping. I am going to make these separate objects from the actual pumpkin, and also place them on a different texture sheet, making the baking process less likely to have errors.