“A balrog, a demon of the ancient world…This foe is beyond any of you.”
—Gandalf to the Fellowship
Recently on Instagram I came across a fantastic head sculpt of the Balrog done by Weta Digital and being a huge LOTR trilogy fan I decided to give it a try. So I started gathering reference for the Fiery ancient creature and set my audio playlist to the LOTR soundtrack and got to work. I mainly grew in sculpting, lighting and materials for this piece and I am excited to share the results!
For achieving the final images I want to thank Zacharias Reinhardt from Cgboost for his advice and his helpful tips and tricks tutorials on sculpting.
And my wife Michelle who always pushes me to make the best work I can.
If you want some useful resources that helped me with this project check these out:
Sculpting and general art tips from Cgboost
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWWybvw9jnpOdJq_6wTHryA/videos
Fire material
CGgeek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctd_09qHacA
Iagon Mota https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoRPa8OrwHs
General settings and great explanation of fire and smoke in Blender
Blender guru https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-zK7Bu8cAI
My reference document:
