This is a scene from my first book, Operational Realities. It shows the main character, SSGT James “Jimmy Two” Adams meeting a Brute for the first time. Not taking any chances, he orders the aircraft providing him with close-air support to fire a missile at the beast.
I modeled most of this scene in Blender, using an HDRI for the background and lighting. Most of the time was spent on the aircraft. The armored figure in the foreground (who’s probably a little too dark) is Jimmy, and that’s a modified version of a hulkbuster iron man model I found online. The original 3d beast was not impressive enough, and didn’t match my idea of how the things look well enough, so I used an Adobe stock image as reference to get the figure right.
After compositing the elements together, I did an overpainting in Photoshop. For the most part, I kept the shadows and highlights the same, but due to some quirks of the rendering engine and my laziness in fixing them, I had to tweak a few spots. This was where all the color came into play, because I hadn’t added materials to anything.
If you look carefully, there’s actually a horde of zombies in the background. It’s hard to see, though. I rather like how this came out, though I’m not above nitpicking it.