Hello everyone. Hope you are doing well.
Since I am an aspiring 3D artist, I thought I can attempt to take part in the Splinterlands Art Contest. This post is my submission for the Art Contest Week 146.
Kron has been one of my favourite cards from the time I discovered him during a battle and one of my opponents was using him. I was impressed by his attack, life and his healing skills. I soon wanted to buy a card but it was around $ 7 that time (not sure) and I had just started playing. So, I thought of just renting the card and buying him later. I still use a rental card and the price now is around $ 40 now 🤓.
Anyway, the reference image I used is the one on the lore page in the Splinterlands game.
The 3D software I use is Blender and I loaded the above image as a plane in the software and set about blocking the shapes and sculpting a little to get the general shape right. Here is one early image :
Sculpting is fun in Blender and pretty intuitive too. I haven't used ZBrush, hence no comments on that. I find it difficult to get the proportions right though; have got trolled for it too before and my biggest critic 
After sculpting away a little more, I made some progress :
Gave some shape and mass to the arms and forearms. I wanted to go for a really powerful, muscular God_like look; but see how I am not really getting the proportions right again.
Some more sculpting:
I started giving some shape to the face area. The nose was probably easier than the eyes. I do struggle to get the face proportions right too.
After a while:
No, not really. An important step in between modelling, sculpting and final rendering is texturing. I first tried my own procedural textures within Blender but felt I was not doing enough justice to the sculpt.
Hence I decided to use Quixel Mixer, another free software, this one from Epic Games, yes, the same people who made the Unreal game and engine.
Here are some screenshots and some different types of looks I tried.
Here's a look I really loved:
I finally imported the textured model into Unreal Engine and used a few assets from Megascans to create the backdrop and rendered this image in Unreal Engine.
Here's a link to a turntable animation I made too:
Hope you liked reading my process; I thoroughly enjoyed doing the whole thing!
Here's my referral link if you have not started playing Splinterlands yet :
https://splinterlands.com?ref=lavista