Balrog from The Lord Of The Rings

Hey all, this is my first day in Blender on a very long time. I decided to do a fanart for The Lord Of The Rings and did Balrog. Textured in SubstancePainter, finalized in Photoshop:


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Update: Worked more on the body:



How does to propotions looks? Does the head need to be bigger?

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Oh oh I love stuff done on LotR and/Or Diablo. If you want to make it like the original, the you might want to spend a bit more time on the head. Since his all body is a massive flame (almost) it means the viewer will know better the head that the rest, so put more detail to it. Also note the possition of the eyes. And nose. Yep great work so far and please do show more:d

Thanks for your feedback :slight_smile: Yes, the viewer wil probably see only the head and some of the arms in the final rendershot. Im wondering about doing only a bust of the head to illustrate the massive body with only flame VFX`s behind.

Sure not a bad idea. I personally have zero to none talent in sculpt mode (tried to make a few landscape things) so since you do have, I would push that out of your comfort zone. This means I would make a story like render (4-5 images on a comic-book layout) with Balrog „story”, picturing him in full flames , movement and hate towards a dark silhouette of a warrior or a group of warriors with their swords lifted to defend or even attack.
Yet he has a massive head (so again do focus on that o bit) that comes out of flames and fumes, and does more damage to the warriors. The action could happen on a bridge in Moria, and only the humans/warriors would stay/fight on it, Balrog is everywhere in that scene.
Then you take a different render with a sword that has blood on it and a hand-glove that barely holds a ring (I would not make the ring resemble at all with the One since that ring is somewhere else in the story).
Then another render with the ring that rolls on the pavement of the bridge and the Balrog watching everything, with a final render in which he-s huge claw stops the ring from going any further. I could go on if you want :smiley:
The point I want to make is that a villain is great when we hate him, yet in movies, monsters rarely get that privilege, perhaps because we love CG so not really focus on the character… You should focus in making us hate the Balrog (so believable yet a true villain) so that it would be better remembered by us the mortals. :smiley:
Sorry for the long post.

Thanks for the elobrated feedback. More details on Balrog will come :slight_smile: Its pretty hard to sculpt details on the model with the Blender brushes. Maybe I should sculpt him in another program and do the CG and VFX in Blender. And yes, what if Gandalf really failed the battle and Balrog survived. Then its up to the other Middle Earth wizards, I know there a few more but I dont remember their names and characteristics.

i really like the whole Middle-Earth lore and stuff, so I wish you luck on this :slight_smile:

Thanks :slight_smile: I actually heard from Weta that they maybe would put this into their fan-art friday.

Seems like importing a 500.000+ polygon Balrog takes abit of time. If it will import at all. EDIT: Nope, no Balrog. I might concider to do a polycountreducing.

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Swords are no use here! Finally got Balrog into Kazadum.

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