The Fall of Lord Humungus

I'm a huge fan of the Mad Max films and thought I would pay homage to them by creating this fan art. As you'll recall, Max killed Humungus in the final crash scene in Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.

My goal was to create a fairly realistic image, so I concentrated a lot of time on getting the flecks in the galvanized steel to protrude and reflect light while having the surrounding steel produce a more matte finish. I also made it a point to create long shadows with the use of an HDRI shot late in the day.

Although my primary focus was modeling the mask (subdivision surface modeling), the sand ended up being very time consuming, as well. The dune is made up of 800,000 particles of sand in varied colors. I also used vertex groups to spread sand on sections of the mask and in the crevices of the wire mesh behind the mask.

It was a lot of fun to work on. Modeled in Blender. Rendered in Cycles. Post-processed in Photoshop.