The Balrog - Fellowship of the Ring

When I first started working at Weta Digital on The Lord of the Rings movies in 2000, I asked if I could paint the textures for the Balrog, as it was my favourite creature from the books. To my surprise, given I only had a single dinosaur I'd textured before I started working there and I've never used 3D texture painting software, they gave it to me, and together with shader writer Rob Strider, we spent nearly 6 months working on the textures and shaders. There were I think there were something like ten layers of textures, with a lot of them painted entirely by hand. I spent a lot of time painting the face and particularly the inside of the mouth knowing we would be full screen and close-up on it, and the whole thing, like most of the films was a labour of love.

I also used to play Dungeons & Dragons when I was a kid, and had a small lead figure of the Balrog I painted when I was about 11 years old. I'd always wanted to work in visual effects and make monsters for movies since I was really young, and I took that lead figure to New Zealand when I moved there to work at Weta, and had it sitting ontop of my computer while I was working on the definitive version of the Balrog. Sometimes childhood dreams to come true.