Pindam sculpt

Hi everyone! Here's my first project done at Skyup Academy: a digital sculpt of the Pindam, an original character based on the Poroniec, a demon fetus from the Slavic folklore. Unlike the Poroniec my creature is benign, using its unexpressed life potential to give life.

Below are my final images, rendered in Maya using VRay.

To create the character, I started by collecting various references that helped me set the tone for the final result and inspired me for the shapes and details. My aim was to create an overall cute character, but with nasty and gory details along its skin, to convey the idea of a good being trapped inside a demonic and evil looking body. 

My character came to life for the first time with these drawings, which show the character in pose and in T-pose. 

The next step was to create a clay version of the character by hand using Monster Clay. I started by shaping a steel wire and rough volumes with tape and steel foil. Later I added different layers of clay, to get the result I had in mind when drawing the character in 2D. 

Here's my final clay sculpture:

The third and final version of the Pindam is the main one of this journey, digitally sculpted in ZBrush. It was my first time using this software and it was quite a challenge to understand and become familiar with its interface and workflow but I finally managed to get a result I'm proud of. I started with the blockout, then moved on to the secondary details and finally the fine details.

First blocking:

Detailing and posing:

Belly and legs details:

Umbilical cord details:

Head details:

Since I had a lot of organic details, it came in handy to create some custom alpha brushes in ZBrush, which helped me achieve a nice level of randomness and realism. 

Once the sculpting phase was complete, I imported the 3D model into Maya, where I placed and adjusted the lights for the final renders. Here is the effect of the different lights I used in my render. 

And finally here are once again my final images, post-processed in Photoshop. Thanks for reading, I hope you enojoyed it!