Only Monsters

So the Witcher 4 got announced! I know it was all only a cinematic, but it looks so cool. I loved the whole fight sequence with Ciri showing off some new witcher abilities. I wanted to recreate one of my favorite shots from the trailer, where Ciri deflects one of the monster's attacks with the Quen shield.

To make Ciri look more like she did in the trailer, I used her model from @Shinteo as a base, then gave her Geralt's armor (also by Shinteo) that I added some fur to and Perrin Hair for Genesis 8 Females from Daz. The monster was originally a werewolf creature that I added extra arms to and adjusted the skin to make it more grey like the monster from the trailer. That was all the easy part, the tricky part was all the effects in Photoshop.

So the most obvious thing in Photoshop was to add the shield. I added a bunch of layers of different effects to give the proper glow around the edges and give it some texture. I also added some particles around Ciri's arm to show her casting it as well as particles scattering from the monster's claw. And of course I added the lens flare to show the flash of the impact.

However, the biggest edits I had to do for this were on the monster itself. I had to completely remake the mouth area to be more beak-like. I added a bunch more teeth and extended the mouth further back to make it look more monstrous. I tried to match the shading of all the creases and skin-folds of the mouth. I also added the saliva and steam from the mouth because I thought it was a nice touch and added to the ferocity. Oh and I also added an extra eye too. I think the monster in the trailer had multiple eyes and I thought it looked cool and scary.

I also had to add a majority of the hair. The hair on top was part of the render, but I had to add the hair on the side. It was definitely tricky getting the shading right and it doesn't look quite as scraggly as I wanted, but I'm happy with it. I also added some sparse hair on the arms as well.

All in all, this was a fun experiment to really try my hand at painting some more complex stuff with Photoshop as well as depicting a cool scene from the trailer.