Abyss Necromancer kala

I was browsing ArtStation looking for a 2D concept, one that hadn't been used by any artist yet, or that few were aware of, for my next personal project. A female character, somewhere between stylized and realistic. So my eye fell on "The Abyssal Necromancer Kala." A subject with several challenges to face and overcome, such as the presence of hard surface elements or organic elements. I decided to take some creative liberties, inserting details and elements that weren't present in the concept or were only sketched out. Like the gloves, which I chose to reinterpret, drawing inspiration from medieval European armor, while leaving the claw aesthetic intact as much as possible. For the dress and fabric elements, I looked for a plausible way for them to function and connect with the decorative and protective elements composing the armor. For the hair, I opted for a technique I learned from 3D sculpting for collectible statues, which I retopped as a single mesh, subsequently projecting the details with normal baking. Some elements of the model had been entirely modeled in Zbrush with the Zmodeller maintaining a clean topology, without triangles or polygons with five vertices, while for others I resorted to retopo, reinforcing the edges and inserting support loops.
All the high-poly modeling of Kala and her bird companion was done in ZBrush. After the sculpting and modeling phase, I moved on to retoping in Blender and correcting some meshes. Again in Blender, I merged the meshes into groups of materials that I used for UV application. For example, in Marmorset Toolbag I imported the NK_Body group, which groups the entire body including the face, eyes, eyelashes, and eyebrows, baking the basic textures such as normals, curvatures, and thickness. After the backing phase, I imported the two models into two separate Substance 3D Painter projects to create the textures. Once the texturing, inspired by Borderlands, was completed, I returned to Blender to rig both characters. For Kala (the female humanoid character), I created a skeleton from scratch, where I also created the pose controllers. For the bird, on the other hand, I used a predefined rig that I adapted. Creating the rig and posing wasn't easy. In the end, I returned to Marmorset Toolbag for the final renders, selecting a suitable HDR, inserting and configuring the lights, and setting up a series of cameras for different shots of both subjects.

Original Concept : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/QXWeLZ

I want to thank the ShortCut community for the feedback and in particular Clara L. Vegel https://www.artstation.com/vegelgrady , Francesco Latini https://www.artstation.com/francescolatini and Giovanni Orlando https://www.artstation.com/giovyx89