Snake Scales

                                                         Tiger Snake Scale Process

A quick rundown of how I set up the scales on this tiger snake model

Base geometry of the snake

Body scales and Belly scales

In Blender I created an array of curves to distribute the  body scales with the 50% offset for each row  

I used geometry nodes to distribute the scales on the points with some random variation and get a flat scales sheet, and a separate one for the belly scales

I used a Blender plugin called mesh materializer to wrap the flat sheet of scales on the the UV space of the snake mode. I used a lattice deformer on the scale sheet to help fit it better and get some scale tapering. I created some different scale sheets to get more control closer to the tail. I then fixed it up a bit in zbrush.
 

https://superhivemarket.com/products/mesh-materializer

The head scales were made by extracting one at a time in zbrush and using zrememsher

 

I used surface deform on the scales to bind them to the rigged snake model

That's pretty much it :)