Dragon Animation Project

Hello, I’m Rachel. I’m new to this forum.
I started this project a while back. I had been working with blender for six months and I said to myself one day, lets make a fully riggable character, a dragon. Hindsight I have to say what was I thinking?! I’ve never before created a 3d character in my life. So I labored for a month and made this: Please don’t kill me because it really does have a lot of flaws. Hopefully I can get it to the point where I can do a little short film. I finished the rig yesterday and I’m going to do the face rig soon. So yeah, any constructive critisim you have I would like to hear. Anything that you see and can help me with would be great. I’m still learning Blender but I love it.




I hope I can get around to posting some better pictures but please leave a comment and thank you!

Very nice - I like the look of it a lot. Looking forward to seeing it in motion.

that is a nice dragon. How did you connect the wings especially at the corner against the body.

Welcome to the forum Rachel. I think your dragon looks quite nice. Did you do the sculpting in Blender? Either way, I’ll look forward to seeing her animated.

A very original looking dragon. You have only been using Blender of 6 months wow that is pretty good.

That is so cute! I use Blender for almost 10 months and I would not be able to do such a dragon. But i make a promise. I will follow a tutorial on dragon and then I will try to do my own one. I just see that it is beautiful!

Thank you guys for your kind comments!
harleynut97- Yes I did sculpt the body in Blender.
spanishrose- I’m not sure what you mean. The body and the wings are one mesh.
cergina- Tutorials are great for learning but I’ve never followed a tutorial word for word, or action for action. Just remember they are there to teach you concepts and techniques so you can apply them to your own work.

Here is the screenshot of my wireframe. I need to work a lot more on the inside of it’s mouth and teeth so that’s what I’ll be doing soon.



Thanks for looking! Tell me if I made any major topology mistakes.

This is rather cute

He looks like the type of Dragon you would have as a loyal companion and not so much the type that would overpower and eat you.

It’s a nice start, the horn material right now looks a bit inorganic though.

Thanks Ace Dragon, I was trying to go for a cute comical type of dragon. I lowered the glossyness of the horns but it’s only evident on the second picture. Any suggestion on how to get it looking less organic?
It was hard to get the dragon’s mouth open. I don’t know if I want to invest more time on the detail of the inside though. I really want to get to the expressions though.



Now that looks like an expressive face.

Now the main things here is that the tongue seems a little like velvet and the teeth don’t seem to have enough SSS.

Do you have SSS going on in the materials now, if not, you might want to try making more use of it. Now it might be that you’re using the GPU to render in Cycles, in which case you might need to search through the tests forum for a fake SSS shader (some of which create a pretty good approximation).

this is nice work.

I really like the textures and the head. The feet don’t look good and the topology of the body will make it hard to have good deformations.

What a cute dragon :smiley:

I spent a while a few years back watching dragons flying around (ok, they were seagulls and ravens… still…) and I’d like to share my observations. Dragons either flap their wings or glide, they don’t combine the two motions. There’s no flap, glide, flap, glide, kind of motion. Either the dragon is climbing, power diving or gaining speed, in which case it’s flap flap flap flap… or the dragon glides on updrafts. Dragons tend to keep their necks straight when flapping, and look around when gliding.

Gliding dragons generally glide downward, unless they are in an updraft, in which case they glide upward. When in an updraft, dragons generally glide in a circle, to stay above the ‘hot spot’ and continue to take advantage of the updraft. So if you see a dragon gliding in a circle, it is usually rising, gliding in a straight line, falling.

When the dragon flaps its wings, there is a power stroke (downward) and a recovery stroke (wings return to top position). On the power stroke the dragon’s torso rises slightly, and speeds up. Dragons with longer necks tend to keep their heads level, so their head bobs up and down in relation to their torso (it’s really the torso going up and down), but stays level in a global sense. On the recovery stroke, of course, the torso drops a bit. Also, on the power stroke, the dragon will speed up slightly, and will slow down a bit on the recovery stroke.

Now, if the dragon is trying to gain altitude, each little rise will be more than each little drop, but the increase and decrease in speed will tend to balance out, so the dragon will go higher but not faster overall. The reverse is true when the dragon is gaining speed: rise and fall about equal, but a bit more speed gained on the power stroke than is lost on the recovery stroke.

When dragons do power dives, though, all bets are off. They can drop under power straight as an arrow. At the bottom of the dive, they don’t lose any speed, they just change direction so they are flying parallel to the ground instead of toward it. And generally snatch up whatever prey attracted their attention in the first place. Landings are quite different. Dragons glide into landing, spilling air and dropping faster than the usual for a glide, until they are almost down, then they do this sort of back stroke with their wings, almost as if they are taking off backwards, which kills their forward speed, and if they are really good, they wind up with zero speed when they get to zero elevation. Most aren’t that good, and arrive at zero speed when they are a few feet above the ground, and leave their wings spread to ‘parachute’ to the ground, sometimes giving a little bit of a power stroke just as they touch the ground.

Anyway, when you get around to animating your cute little critter, I hope this will help you out.

Thanks BluePrintRandom.

macktruck6666: I agree with you about the topology. I’ve planned to go back and repto the body again. As for the feet, I’m kind of stumped on what to do. I like the design/silhouette of the dragon with large feet but from my simple rigging so far it’s kind of hard to accomplish believably while animating. I’m thinking about shrinking them down. Any thoughts on if I should do this?

Orinoco: Watching birds fly has always been a favourite pass-time for me as well. You’ve put a lot of thought into your post, and it does make sense. Being able to animate flying creatures was one of the main reasons I started using Blender. They are fascinating in how they move. Thank you for you post, I enjoyed reading it and I’ll remember your points when I get to the animating stage.

For anyone that has been watching this thread I’m sorry I haven’t posted any updates. I’ve been spending quite some time researching the techniques I need to fix and complete this character. I have learnt a lot about topology, texturing and rigging over the last few months working on other characters. I really like this dragon, it was the first character I made and it’s very special to me. I want to get back to this project soon but I realize I’m going to have to scrape a bunch of the work I did on it before.

I redid the reptopology on the body, tell me what you think.
Old:


New:

Improvement?

The result should be more or less the same once you add a subsurf modifier, I think this scheme in general should be easier to animate (especially around the base of the legs).


I know it’s been a long time but I’ve been busy. In between other personal projects and client work I’ve been still working on this slowly. I’m trying out a new color pallet and shaders. More work left to do on the shader. Just an update.

Thanks for looking.

Nice to see this project going again, it looks like you’ve made some good progress on the shading.

Though the horns not having any textures on them appeared to expose what might be too much of a ‘crumpled’ look (almost as if they were made of paper).

Thanks Acedragon. Worked on the horns today.