Knär Concept Sculpt
"The biggest chambers in hell are home to its biggest dangers, the ancient Knär."
"These colossal demons are a force of nature of the underworld. They wander though the giant caves and seas in solitary, for they are extremely territorial and violent towards most life, but specially their own kin."
"Their heads are crowned by skull shaped auricular horns, an exaltation of their natural role in death that grants them a higher hearing, beyond the physical plane."
Turnaround. You can also see a very simple kitbash of demon houses and statues I made, that use my procedural stone shader. I really like how the tiny buildings look.
Posed Turnaround
This is just a sketch explanation of how the crevices fill with blood and and emit light as they heat. In a more developed version I would imagine the scars would open and blood would organically fill the crevices creating the patterns.
A version with no blood, with scar coloration.
Posed version with no blood, scars almost invisible, in their most closed state.
Zbrush file has all the polypaint information.
The polypaint information is used to drive the shader. Emissive, skin type, roughness... everything is extracted from the same poypaint and mixed with tileable maps that are projected via box mapping. No manual UVs were used for its texturing.
"The Knär are the very definition of power in hell."
The biggest chambers in hell are home to its biggest dangers, the ancient Knär.
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These colossal demons are a force of nature of the underworld. They wander though the giant caves and seas in solitary, for they are extremely territorial and violent towards most life, but specially their own kin.
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The knär, same as common demons, are unique in their appearance, not two are alike even though they share many common traits. The most obvious is their titanic scale, this alone makes them unrivalled creatures. Their skin, unpenetrable, appears as a layer of stone over the huge muscles. Horn-like protussion raise as spiky rocks all over their sillhouette. Their boiling blood, of the purest red, runs glowing through crevices that open through their skin like wounds. Their heads are crowned by skull shaped auricular horns, an exaltation of their natural role in death that grants them a higher hearing, beyond the physical plane.
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Creators of storms, tremors and other calamities, their abstract perception of the world makes them irascible and dangerous for demon civilizations, and only through prayers and fear will their wrath be avoided. However, do not mistake them for gods... Knärs are wild beasts, there is no judgement or lessons coming from them, only pure savage instinct.
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The Knär are the very definition of power in hell.
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This creature was intented as a test to see if I could make cinematic shots out of a non production ready model in UE5. What I mean with this is that it wasn't done with the conventional 3D process. Instead I created a shader that extracts information out of the polypaint to create masks, which set different kind of textures over the model, with a simple simple box mapping. The intention behind it is to test the model with shaders at the same time I sculpt and design it, a way to have a somehow cinematic model in a concept sculpt stage. Buildings are made in a similar manner, and then megascans were used to populate the environments, alongside with William Faucher's Easy Snow and Easy Fog UE5 plugins. By no means I consider this to be a better workflow than the one from conventional cinematic modeling, it is only an experiment that I will carry forward as a way to faster develop my world building in the most cinematic way possible.
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Knär are an important part of hell and I still want to experiment a bit more with their design, this has been my first approach for a full body Knär, but it is not set in stone, please take this as a concept!
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Hope you like it!