Making of The War Troll by Arnab Roy, India
I modeled the character War Troll for my entry at Autodesk Mudbox Armed and Dangerous Challenge.
My initial idea was to basically create a reptile like biped with strong structural feel as well with an aggressive attitude. I also wanted to put a drastic contrast in forms by adding a female figure to the composition but later did not continue with the idea due to lack of time.

Here are my initial concept sketches and reference sheet:

Next I started to make a very boxy base mesh with all quads in Maya and gave a very basic volume in mudbox:

Next I started sculpting the model in Mudbox:
During this process I mostly used the following tools and occasionally with some combination of STAMPS:

But during the process of sculpting I never bothered about the loops or any technical issues rather I concentrated on sculpt rhythm flow etc .

Then I generated a animatable mesh in Maya using the awesome NEX tools from DRaster.I used the Quad Draw function of NEX to generate the topology.
I first exported the 3rd or 4th division Mudbox mesh and broke them into several parts for easy retopology in Maya.
During the process of topology I retweaked the model several times and I used Send to Mudbox and vice versa feature of Autodesk creative suit 2013:

Then I completed the UV of the entire model and accessories:
Similarly I created a total of 12 UV layout which means I planned to distribute the model into 12 texture maps of 2048x2048 for the bigger models and 1024x1024 for the smaller parts.
Once the model is finally over and the UVs are done I started the process of transferring the high detail version of Mudbox to the newly generated topology using
MESH > TRANSFER DETAILS in Mudbox.

Next I quickly posed the model using Mudbox and Maya Bones and retweaked the model wherever it got messed while posing :

And I baked Displacement and Normal Maps of all 12 textures in Mudbox using
MAPS > EXTRACT TEXTURE MAPS.
Once all this are done I started to paint the textures in Mudbox:

Next I extracted the Color Map, Specular Map and Ambient Occlusion Map from Mudbox :
Once the modeling and texturing phase is over I started the most lengthy part of this project which is rendering. Since as a modeling and texturing Artist I learnt a lot in this phase.
I used Mental Ray for rendering and Fast SSS shader for Skin material generation.
I used a basic 3 point light with HDRI for lighting.
The Lighting stages:

For the Skin Shader I used MISS FAST SKIN SHADER

And Finally for compositing I used a very few render passes:

And I followed a pretty simple render settings:

Finally I was happy with the result with few additional tweaks like blur, cloud, lens adjustment and noise in photoshop: