Ascended Mordex - Animated Illustration

This is an animated artwork as fan art for Brawlhalla's 'Ascended Mordex', a skin over a playable character, 'Mordex'. The ascension of a legend is meant to mark their ultimate form, the end of their journey. For 'Mordex', it results in this form, which I tried my hand at.

For context, the addition of this skin resulted in a 'Map Takeover', meaning an in-game stage was reworked with a new coat of paint, becoming the Fortress of Lions - a fortress for the side of humanity's fight against the monsters, to the Fortress of Wolves - where it seems that the monsters have won. Octavius Mordex, whom is the werewolf, was a traitorous human who turned into a werewolf, now, the "leader of the pack", so to speak. To depict this, I wanted to have Mordex watch over his now-claimed territory.

The composition on this one was fun to do. Because I wanted to include both the character and the stage clearly, I had both of them equally in the shot. Had I gone a different route and focused purely on Mordex himself, I would have had him standing atop one of the towers of the buildings in the background, with the moon's glow behind him to make a really powerful image. But because I opted for both the character and the big mountain shaped as a wolf, this is what I came up with.

Mordex's animation was fun to pull off. For my animated illustrations, it follows the same "skeletal structuring", where I break down each component and animate them separately - for example, the body, which is a loop of animation where he breathes outward and inward. For previous works, I would have used interpolation to have it grow bigger and then smaller. For this one, because of his monstrous build, I wanted to animate it by hand, so his chest would grow as accurately to a werewolf as I could in this shot. There are other components, like his ears, which are pointed upwards to get across that 'scouting' motion I had in mind while creating this piece. His "Cerberus wolf ghost heads" were interesting to work on - as I didn't want to take away from the pose, but the ghost heads were integral to his design. As such, I had them add to his pose, watching over the Fortress of Lions from every angle.

My biggest struggle on this piece was the environment. I'd like to work on my backgrounds more - namely clouds and details/texturing like grass, mountains, etc. I will be working on this as my craft goes on.

This is one of my best rendered shots to date, and I only plan on furthering my improvement.