Nosferatu

When I was looking for references for my previous 3D work I stumbled upon a stunning artwork of a death knight (namely, Death Knight Hashim) from Disciples III game. I instantly wanted to make a 3D model of him. I also like nosferatu designs from this game, so I ended up creating a mix of those 2 concepts (death knight + nosferatu).
This project was a huge challenge for me. I did many things for the first time and many a time I had to research something before trying to create it. For example, I never modeled horses. I had to study horse anatomy and save dozens of references for future use. I also experimented with different hair workflows. I used Ornatrix Maya, Maya XGen and tried hair cards hand-placement approach. In my scene I incorporated all three mentioned approaches.
There was some trial and error with chainmail. I didn’t like how the textures turned out at first. In the end I made a low-poly base and created chainmail texture maps in ZBrush. Speaking of textures I made the following texture sets for this project.

Nosferatu:
4k Armor
2k Head
2k Details (leather straps and buckles)
1k Alphas (chainmail and bandages)
1k Mouth

Steed:
4k Armor
2k Body
1k Alphas (cloth blanket)
1k Mouth

Sword:
2k Main

To pose my model I created a rig for both Nosferatu and his steed using Maya AdvancedSkeleton5 and ngSkinTools plug-in. I have never used these tools before, so I had to do some research here as well.
The sizes of my models are as follows.

Nosferatu:
67k tris main
3.5k tris hair
4.6k eyebrows (I guess it’s not an optimal count for such small detail, but it surely can be disabled in the real-time version of the model where most of the face is hidden under the helmet)
7.7k eyelashes (same as previous)

Steed:
52k tris main
6.4k hair
3.3k hair strands on the bridle

Sword:
15k tris

Before creating this work I set my quality bar quite high. I was thinking about such masterpieces as the Witcher 3, Dark Souls III and Elden Ring. I hope I was able to show at least half as good quality as you could expect from these games.