Arms of Rising Fury

This is my final project for my Foundations Term on Think Tank Online, it was completed in roughly 5 and a half weeks. The goal of the project was to take a piece of concept art and recreate it in 3D using the best of your ability. Massive thank you to all of my classmates, friends, and family and to my instructor Renato Scicchitano for all the support and feedback!

This is the original concept by Jakob Eirich, he made it for a custom loading screen for the game Dota 2. 

Here is his artstation: https://www.artstation.com/jakob_eirich

This the loading screen on the Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=317446080&searchtext=arms+of+rising+fury

This is the general progress that I went through. One thing worth noting is the clouds/smoke which I attempted to create with Maya fluids: the final result did not include any actual volumetrics as the background was simply composited from the concept (by the background I mean only the sun and the smoke). I managed to create a fluid simulation that looked somewhat similar to the concept but I wasn't too happy with the final result so I simply composited the concept for the final product. 

Either way this render below is a previous render that includes the real fluid simulation that I came up with using Maya Fluids: