First dragon - any advice appreaciated

Today I started this small project. I spent almost 6 hours on this - two were for tutorial to learn the basics- and I know that it needs many tweaks, but Iam kinda lost when it comes to texturing this creature. Am I supposed to hand paint it or what? Or I dont know. The scales are little bit hard to achieve.




I think it looks nice. I see you fulfilled your promise you posted on my thread. Dragons I have always found to be a touchy subject when it comes to makingconstructive criticism on them as they can come in nearly any form and style, but there are some things that both me as far as anatomy.
The legs look like they were pasted on. Could you pull them in toward the chest and make the transistion from the shoulder and the hips to the body a bit smoother? Also, in my opinion, the chest area looks a bit too wide. The wings are a little weird to me, they almost remind me of butterfly wings. What were you trying to go for as the shape and idea? Could you post a wireframe shot of it also?

Keep working and have fun! It’s a great start!

Did you just start using Blender?

If so, then an impressive start considering that fact. A few things you can improve on right away is that the teeth, wings, and wing thumbs look a bit angular to be realistic. You also want to make sure that your edge-loop flow can facilitate improvements to the model if it’s not that way already.

As for the scales, give the Dragon a UVmap and create a seamless 2D scales texture, then paint that texture onto the Dragon using the improved 3D painting toolset available in Blender’s texture paint mode.

Thank you for your opinions and advices.
Rachel: The idea was something between nice and strong dragon and here is the wireframe.
Ace Dragon: I ve been trying to achieve what you said, but I dont know if I did it correctly.




Next set of pictures.



At first glance, I notice right away that the wing topology needs a lot of work, it looks quite messy right now and there’s a good chance you might need to redo it completely.

One of the big issues with the wings is the 6-pole junctions that are everywhere (ie. 6 edges coming to a single point). You might want to try to make sure that you have edgeloops flowing on top of and alongside the wing supports and along the edges of the wing (intersecting each other if needed). Right now the mesh is in a way that doesn’t facilitate a whole lot of possible improvement in the form (as in making it look organic and getting a tighter and more consistent design for the supports).

Je bezva napsat, že i lidé ze Střední Evropy umí kvalitně pracovat (modelovat) ! :slight_smile: Supr model, co takhle dodělat bony a udělat animaci ? :slight_smile:

I didnt even realised that I had there 6 poles until you told me. Thank you Ace Dragon. I tried to do the wings again but I left the last part with the sting, because I like it. Here are few changes I made.
Vena: A, dobré počuť, že aj niekto iný je na blenderartists z okolia! :slight_smile: ps.: čo sú to bony?
// edit: - aha kosti




Another thing you could work on are the teeth, generally, a tooth would usually not get larger in width or length halfway through like currently seen on your model (the outward angular bends on the right side are pretty odd as a result).

You might want to check how you modeled them and make sure they subsurf well.

Some of the horns also don’t seem too flush with the skin (usually you wouldn’t have the skin material go up past the base, either that or there’s a tight transition point).

Iam little bit of an angry. I tried to do inverse kinematics (I already did, few weeks ago on a Lego creature) but now it is horrible. I have not added any weights to mesh to bones for now and I am so angrz that when I move it it just moves very badly - the bones move really wrong - and the body moves and it shouldnt. I dont know how to describe it. I did few of an tutorials now on the bones, but I must have missed something, because it just doesnt work. And when I added empty groups so no verticles could move, it moved also. Seems that person that told me that rigging in Blender ,is horrible, was right about it.

ps.: I made a new teeths but I just cant post them here now when this happened.

// inverse kinematics is the one to blame. I had to make bad settings .

You should ask in the animation support forum if you have issues with getting a rig set up. The quality of help you receive will be much better quality than what you might get here.

So today I was again working on the dragon. His teeth are finally better and the rig is almost finished. I cant say that Iam 100% satisfied. Altough verticle groups attached to bones are the same on both sides of dragon, either front and rear leg is moving but destroying the shape of his leg. I will post also to the support centre, I gave this post here to show off at least the teeth and that I ve done the rig normaly - the manual way - no inverse kinematics possible.


Attachments


I repaired the rig. Luckilly the inverse kinematics is working, I had to figure out few options and settings and finally do the few vertex groups again. IK for legs is not very comfortable for me to work with - now - The wings are the only thing that I will be animating with IK.




Ok, I added there some bump maps and played with nodes to create white skin displacement,gum and teeth. It is almost finished.



So this is the next stage.


The Dragon’s looking good so far, the next stuff would to be to paint some more custom textures for him (like for the interior of the mouth), and start making better use of SSS shading.

There’s also some solid shading still visible on the teeth, that should probably all be smooth shaded.

Maybe give some attention to underside if it’s belly. I am picturing something like a snake’s belly. Looking real good so far!

So, I added some fish,plants,trees and waterillys :slight_smile:


Because of many imperfections and wrong details I had to work on it again. Clouds added during post-processing.


So, I think that it could be finished for now, what do you think about it? Any suggestions welcomed!