World Building 7 - Dragon



For this project we had to design a dragon and do our own paintover, based off a model in mudbox.

For my moodboard, I was typically looking at typical fantasy dragon designs, normally seen in more western productions.

I started off originally with the intention of completely doing the project as an illustration, mainly due to the fact I can't really get on with Mudbox, as I find it can be confusing and unpredictable at times, when not working from a base mesh.

However in the end I decided to bite the bullet and attempted to create my model from scratch in the program. I decided to use what I had done so far with the illustration to use as a sketch and reference.

Due to time constraints and other difficulities, I didn't have time to really make a base mesh for my model, so instead I experimented with working from a sphere as I would do in sculptris.



I started off by pulling out the rough and basic forms of the dragon. I initially had problems with this particular method, as I would constantly have to raise the subdivision levels in order to produce more polygons for me to sculpt with. This is an issue as having to go too high poly too quickly, means I miss out on adding much needed detail, such as bumps and scales.

In hindsight it would of been better to use a base mesh - however as stated I had little time unfortunately in regards to this project and other commitments.



I made the wings and horns seperately in 3dsmax, before importing them into the scene. I'm happy with the wings shape however I think I made the base too spindly in hindsight, it should be much thicker at the shoulder muscle. I messed around with the different light settings and composition before rendering. I could not pose the model too much, as it took two minutes to reload the scene everytime I posed a part of the model - this got very infuriating.

Once rendered I brought the render into photshop, and duplicated and hid one of the renders to use as a lighting reference for later. I decided to wrap around kmodo dragon and iguana hide textures around the model to give it some colour and texture to the render.

Once I had every thing textured, I overlayed the render to use as a general lighting guide for my dragon. I then did some tweaking with the textures and depth, to highlight more muscles and uneven surfaces, due to the lack of bumps and surfaces on my sculpt.

I think overall I was pleased with the how my lightign came out in photoshop, it was less flat and more atmospheric than the lighting I've experimented with before. That being said, I think if I had more time on the sculpt I could of pushed the detail even further, as some more careful planning and detail on the sculpt could of resulted in a much better result and would of saved me some time with when it came to texturing and rendering.

In furture, I will definitely do a base sculpt to add the detail earlier on, so it will look alot better when it comes to the actual paintover.