Dark Mage

This is the concept art by the brilliant Feng Wei. It was a challenge to decipher some pieces of the character as they tended to get lost in the gloomy atmosphere and the huge amounts of detail in the image.
This is why I helped myself by drawing outlines around some key parts.

Some of the pieces were hidden by the view of the original concept so I was lucky enough to have gotten the chance to do quite a bit of concepting myself.

This was by far the most complicated character I have ever worked on.
When I saw the concept for the first time I instantly fell in love with it, but I knew it would demand all of my skill, willpower, patience, and some more of that on top. Luckily I can say that even though there are many many things I still would have liked to do on this character, I am quite happy with the results.

The best part about this project was that I could do 80% of the detail in Zbrush by utilizing my abilities as a sculptor.

Early on my Mentor and I decided not to worry about getting this character perfectly game-ready with optimized Polycount, UVs, and textures, which enabled me to focus on making this character look as detailed as possible.
With the sheer amount of pieces and skin variations, this would have easily cost another month and my last two final projects at Think Tank were already game-optimized so it didn't feel necessary to spend that time. In the end, I think this was a great decision for the benefit of the character and myself. It gave me a lot less to worry about with this project that already cost me so much blood sweat, and tears.

Some progress shots of the sculpting in Zbrush. 90% of the time in this project was spent there.

The Back of the character was also a part that I enjoyed coming up with myself. It was fun to do some creative anatomy sculpting on that big rounded surface.

I thought it would be fitting to have the Spikes enter into his flesh in the back. I had to cut a giant hole in the back of his cape, which makes the design more interesting overall in my opinion.

Some Iray Renders from Substance Painter. It's crazy how different everything looks after Look Dev in Marmoset.

This was a piece I particularly enjoyed coming up with myself. It was a very welcome break from copying everything from the concept. I had to cover up his private parts in some way after all.

I didn't want this old magician to have any blood on his teeth or claws, since I didn't think it would quite suit the character to be a preying monster like that.

Since his whole attire seems so comically impractical, almost self-torturous, I thought that if he would bleed anywhere then it would be due to something self-inflicted.

So that's why I came up with this metal harness that is inspired by medieval chastity belts. (Very sorry if this disturbs you!)

An interactive low-res version of the posed model.

Turntable:
Textures were slightly altered after rendering this.

BONUS 1: THE GHOST OF THE ARCHIVES

My first final project at Think Tank Training Centre.

We had 4 weeks to render a still scene from a concept.
Most of it was modeled in Maya and rendered there too with Vray

Sculpting the ghost was the most challenging since it combines sculpting folds and character creation.

The chains were a big challenge too, but I managed to duplicate them along a spline with a feature called animation snapshot.

Behind the Scenes

BONUS 2: BATWING DEMON

This was a regular assignment where we had 3 weeks next to normal classes to create a creature anatomy bust.

I chose the Batwing Demon from Dark Souls since the original concept far surpasses the in-game model in detail and I wanted to give my own spin on it.

The stunning concept from the Dark Souls Design Works vs my first iteration of the sculpt.

Thank you so much for reading all this and HUGE THANKS to my mentor Marcin Klicki for all his wisdom!