Absu

This is a doodle I put together last summer of a portrayal of Absu, Babylonian God of Fresh Water. It's part of a series I'm putting together based on the Babylonian creation myth. After I spent about thirty days whittling down everything, getting it perfect, throwing it out, starting over, and getting it even more perfect, I decided to leave it alone for a while and, as they say, "marinate" on it. Half a year and three versions of Blender later, I pick it up again and decided to render it as is.

There are a few glaring problems—the mysterious golden wire hovering in the air, which was part of the original outfit; as well as the clipping of the sculpting hammer through his clothing. This is minor stuff though; I'm not that worried about it, I can take care of it in the final draft. What bugged me more about it was the fact that I bit off too much at once. Absu himself is largely hand-sculpted from a basic extrusion model of his form—there's no cheating or even any sophisticated tool use there, not even for the armature; there's no point, I'd be making substantial changes to it anyway—and I spent quite a bit of time just resetting my topology for it so it would animate properly.

This is how we advance as artists, though.

Tools used included not only Blender (2.80, though the final render was in 3.0.0) but also GIMP & GEGL, and I'm almost certain I used FFMPEG for something, but can't remember what!

My return to it should involve substantial video compositing, perhaps some adjustments to camera tracking and scene composition, and likely a fresh take, based on this one, for Absu's appearance. I would also like to get a good face shot in there, so we can really see all the details.