“Lewain” is a character of my own creation and is part of a fantasy world which I have envisioned.

He is the childhood friend of one of my previous elfen characters (“Thralia”) and is a mischievous and arrogant young thief who can't stay out of trouble.

In this image we see Lewain going to poach for valuable crystals in the river. I decided to situate Lewain on a wooden base to allow me to present the character and hint at the type of environment in which he lives.

The project was initially started as an exercise in Mudbox, where I sculpted the head from a cube. The high-resolution head mesh was imported in to 3ds Max 2010 where I used the new Graphite Modelling Tool Kit to re-topologise the model, and continued to build the rest of the character. Lewain was unwrapped using Xray Unwrap, and his textures were created in Photoshop.

Materials and rendering were done with Vray, and some slight post-processing and effects was done with Photoshop.

Modelling and Rendering the 1.3 million polygon scene was completed in 11 parts on an Intel Q9550, with 4GB memory, a Geforce GTX285 and Windows Vista 32bit.

The image took about 4 weeks to complete in my spare time in the evening and at weekends.