Splinterlands Fan Art : Sea Monster

Hello everyone, hope you are doing fine. This is my second attempt at Splinterlands fan art, again I chose to do it in 3D, but this time I chose a different software - Nomad Sculpt, which works on both Android and iOS.

The Sea Monster is one of my favourite monsters in Splinterlands. Many a low mana battles have been won by the use of just this monster alone. So why not pay some homage!

A little bit of lore from the official Splinterlands website :

There are rumors of Sea Monsters that can swallow a ship whole. The truth is, there are Sea Monsters big enough to swallow the Sea Monster that swallowed the ship whole. Most land lubbers cannot conceive how deep within the planet or how far beyond the horizon the oceans go.

My reference image:

A little lore if I may add from my side (not official, entirely my imagination) :

....the strange green blue algae, which appears to glow in water, lives and thrives mostly on the back of the Sea Monster. It is inseparable from the Sea Monster and some wonder if it is a part of the Sea Monster, like its skin and not just a symbiotic relationship as previously believed.

The slimy liquid on the surface of the Sea Monster is believed to be produced by the algae and has magical properties of healing any wounds the Sea Monster may sustain. Many believe that the Sea Monster can live forever because of this healing property of the algae.

The Sea Monster mostly spends time deep in the oceans, where it is impossible for the light to reach and the water appears like dark ink. It
does surface occasionally to....

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Modelling

Here are the steps which I followed :

• As always, I keep the reference image in the background and start with a primitive shape. Here, I started with a cylinder and after some dragging and moving the cylinder, I sculpted the rough likeness of the Sea Monster.
  

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• I then concentrated on the head and mouth part and tried the paint tool too.
  

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• After some more use of the 'drag' and 'move' tool, the spikes and horns and tentacles were ready! Actually, for the horns, the 'tube' tool was really helpful and simple.

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Texturing

I now had to texture my model well enough to look presentable. I'll be honest and admit that I did import the model into Blender and tried my infamous procedural texturing methods. It looked pretty bad.

So I went back to my iPad and used the Procreate software to create these following 'masks' to use as displacement modifiers in Nomad Sculpt.

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After applying the displacement modifiers coupled with colours, I thought it looked OK.

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Finishing touches

Then I wanted to try the 'Depth Of Field' effect to emphasise the enormity of our beloved Sea Monster and the effect looked alright.

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It was now time to add some more colour and textures to the rest of the teeth and eyes and head. I then exported the image to Procreate and tried creating an underwater effect with the Spackle It brush by Flo.

Then I used the inbuilt luminance brushes to add some more organisms floating around in the sea and gave some of them a Guassian Blur to try creating a depth effect, it did not work very well I feel.

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Here are some more images from the sculpt :

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Turntable Animation

Here's the link to the turntable animation:

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In case you are still not playing this great game, here is my referral link : https://splinterlands.com?ref=lavista
Get right into the game, you will not look back!
See you in the next one.