Splinterlands Arts Contest: 3D Modeling/Scuplting and Animating the Sacred Unicorn

Greetings everyone.

Here is another humble work/art of mine.
I made a 3D version of Splinterlands' Sacred Unicorn.

I am very happy to finally finish this as it is my very first sculpted character. 🙂

Below are some still renders taken at different angles:

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My Modeling and Sculpting Process

Creating the Sacred Unicorn from scratch is time consuming.
To save time, I started from the base mesh that I have previously prepared.
The process on how I created my base mesh can be found here: https://peakd.com/hive-174301/@thecuriousfool/playing-horse-constructing-a-horse-base-mesh

My base and starting mesh that I've created from my previous post.

Since my base mesh has flat ears, I started by giving it an indentation.
Also, I already planned on sculpting my character, so I increased the topology with Blenders' multiresolution modifier.
This will give me more vertices to work on.



Looking at my target or reference image, there's a lot of things I need to modify on my base mesh.
Obvious difference are;
(1) the grumpy face,
(2) the neck,
(3) the back feet,
(4) the slimmer body and
(5) the bulging muscles.

My target or main reference image - Splinterlands' Sacred Unicorn.

I started by shaping my horse body and making the muscles of the feet bulge out.



I proceeded next by shaping the eyes. I made it bigger and shaped it to make it as if it is glaring.

Btw, I also adjusted the neck at this point.
I forgot to take a screenshot while doing it.



After that, I moved on shaping the nose and then indent the neck to emphasize some muscles.



I moved on in shaping the mouth.



Next, I shaped the back legs to match my target image.



I then moved to the head and made a unihorn. 😁



After that, I created the eyeballs. Adjusted the eyes lids and then placed the iris.



I then colored the eyes and the horn blue.
The horns have darker blue.
I am still deciding on the color of my unicorn at this point so I tried dark brown.



I moved on next to the hoof the horse and colored it blue.



Next thing is the mane.
I used a combination of curves to make the individual thick hairs.



After that, I moved on in making the tail hairs with the same method.



After I am satisfied with the look of my unicorn, I moved on rigging.
After that, I researched on how a horse move and picked the easiest to implement in my animation. 😁

The reference video I found to be useful can be found here.
I ended learning more about how horse moves because of this. 🙂



After that, I moved on in adding the magical effect on the unihorn. 🙂
I did some research and found that an electric effect is closer to what I am aiming for.
The guide, or tutorial, I used can be found here.



After that, I used Blenders' particle system to make the unihorn emit some acceptable energy effect. 🙂



I proceeded next by adding a ground and stones on my scene.
Since I am aiming for a seamless animation, I place the stone to hide the start and end of my frame.
I had difficulty in making the ground seamless on the animation so I leave it as is.



I give the ground a brown shading and the stone reddish brown.



I moved on finally on compositing to add the background. I also add a glare effect on the unihorns' visible energy.

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Final Thoughts

At last, I finished it. 🙂
It took me a more than three days to finally finished my output.
Since most of the things I did here are my first, I learned a lot from it.

My work still has a lot of room for improvement.
But I am sure that as long I keep going, I will certainly improve it one day.

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Thank you for taking the time to read my post.

I hope that you like my work.

Feel free to drop your suggestion on the comments below.
I would love to hear them.

Again, thank you and more power!

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IMPORTANT:
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*** Offer is only available while supply lasts.

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Attribution:
Reference image(sacred unicorn), logo and all cards images belongs to Splinterlands.
3D model is sculpted, rigged, animated and rendered with Blender.
GIF image is made using Krita.