Dragon WIP

Update:


http://i.imgur.com/fq5eX4i.png


Been working on a dragon concept, finished laying down a general base mesh over the dynamesh sculpt. Looking to get some feedback while changes are still easy to make:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]350531[/ATTACH]

http://i.imgur.com/SXzw9IC.png
http://i.imgur.com/yJ3DeRV.png
http://i.imgur.com/juVzjzT.png
http://i.imgur.com/1OXXpZ1.png

(note: horns/claws and the like will be better blended into the mesh later, they’re mostly in there for reference atm). Any feedback is appreciated!

i like it, if its not gonna be a friendly dragon i would suggest spines or plates or spikes going down its back and tail. looks good otherwise :slight_smile: its got a poke - esque charm to it

What are you going for here? It’s definitely blobby and indistinct but that would be appropriate for a cartoonish model depending on what you do for the materials. I like the snake-like elements to the head and tail but might like that emphasized in the body as well, maybe by making it sleeker. The only part that really needs work is the feet; the ankle area is fat and makes the foot look like a broken extension of the leg, especially from the front. Add a more obvious joint there.

http://i.imgur.com/AjFivnL.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ERwF16g.jpg

A few zbrush shots while I detail and attempt to figure out how to do scales. Spikes/muscles are working well, scales…I’m less happy with. Need to still add scars/folds and the like to the skin too.

Details look nice but the broad anatomy is still wonky looking. Dragon wings are almost always portrayed as the equivalent of, say, bat wings, as a functioning vertebrate forelimb. Basically an extended hand, where the “spokes” supporting the wing are very long fingers which all then radiate from the same hand area. But your wings look like tree branches, you’ve got a spoke coming out of the wing from nowhere in particular and the main support bone of the wing appears to be a jointless curved pole. Can your dragon fold his wing? The same applies to the legs as well; they appear undifferentiated. Try going up a few subdivision levels, sharpen the anatomy, then go back to add scales.

Tbh, it didn’t ever occur to me that wing might be tricky to fold. To give a little backstory on this, about a month or two ago I doodled some ideas for a realistic depiction of the pokemon Salamence, to see if I could tweak the design to something that made more sense. In the end I gave up on that, deciding Salamence’s horribly unfeasible body plan was part of what made it distinctive. ANYWAY, I really liked the wing silhouette I came up with for that, and decided to re-use it on slightly more practical dragon of my own devising. Somewhere in there the tail rattle and cobra hood showed up, but this whole thing was largely based around doing some sort of something with a wing shape I liked. I guess I never really stopped to think how such a wing would be folded. Maybe he just wouldn’t ever fold the wing completely and just rest it on the ground, I don’t know.

Sorry i missed your earlier post, btw, I don’t know how I didn’t notice that was there. I see what you mean about the ankle, I think I can fix that without backtracking too much. Could you elaborate on what you meant about the leg in the second post though?

Here’s a top-down shot of said wing, btw


The final plan with this is to get a render of the dragon in his lair, I was thinking of doing an old abandoned nuclear reactor building for the environment, just to be different from the classic castle/cave stuff. I haven’t really spent much time planning environment specifics though, just roughly how I want the shot laid out.

The unusual anatomy gives the impression it came from the How to Train Your Dragon franchise. Right now though, it almost looks like he wouldn’t even be able to walk nonetheless stand (his chest seems to have the same weighty feel as a tank).

Yeah I can see the Salamence in the wings, but I think it works better there on a dragon more overtly stylized. If you want to keep the axe-wing shape I’d thicken the wing’s support ridge a little and beef up the area where it connects to the body, because it looks like one flap would rip the wings off. That, or you might exaggerate the rest of the dragon’s anatomy more. As for the legs, they don’t have obvious knees or even clear divisions between thigh and calf region. I just can’t see how your dragon would even walk. And the foot (the part that touches the ground) seems to go on so far back that it looks more like a broken part of the leg. See here in red on this picture. Also, there seems to be a weird lump on each leg; if that is the knee its in the wrong spot. Otherwise seems to large to be nothing; almost tumorlike.


Ok, in between moments of Christmas, I re-worked the base mesh a good bit, then decided to just start the detail sculpt over from scratch. So here we are: legs more defined, knee is in the position it’s supposed to be (where the original zsphere sketch had it), chest is slimmer, wing roots are bigger and I’ve removed the crossbar in the wing.

http://i.imgur.com/0fhXPAJ.jpg

Better leg (yes, I know the dewclaw is in the wrong spot): http://i.imgur.com/ObQQTLx.jpg

Still playing with ideas for scales. Like the general look of the heavy plate, but I feel like it hides body shape too much. (plate armor has a way of that in general…). Might need to play with the opacity on this, or go for something different. http://i.imgur.com/wX2J3Xe.jpg

I’m considering doing the scales/armor by just extracting sections so I get actual plate pieces. Also don’t have to deal with displacement polygon counts that way…

Looks way better now! I’m still seeing the feet weird though. I think its the combination of the foot and toe length. All the toes come from this one point, which looks like the actual “foot” but that bit is actually right at the end of your dragon’s “foot”. Generally, on bird or dinosaur-like feet (same thing really) the toes are the “foot”, meaning the bit that touches the ground. Your dragon looks plantigrade, like a human, but the really long toes seem unneeded on such a long foot, and the dewclaw, as you said, suggests the “ankle” bone of your dragon is actually the back of the foot (like on a dinosaur foot). Basically you’ve hybridized human-like and bird-like foot anatomy and it’s confusing the impression. I’d pick one or the other; either drop the dewclaw and shorten the toes or make the leg anatomy more explicitly digitigrate. Hope that made sense.

Think I got a scale design I like: http://i.imgur.com/BjobvmR.jpg

And since you’re all probably really sick of looking at Zbrush shots on BLENDERartists, how about a Cycles render of the re-assembled model in the actual character file? http://i.imgur.com/runtbPc.jpg

And how about an quick environment doodle? http://i.imgur.com/Ct3a5eB.jpg

The plan is for the final shot to basically look like that last image, except…better. (and with the dragon in a pose that makes sense)

Environment construction underway: http://i.imgur.com/fq5eX4i.png

Gonna see if I can nail down the abandoned/burned out building look.

(note: dragon is in a useless temp pose atm)

Looking at these pictures, have you considered where the center of gravity is? To me it seems like it’s where his stomach is and I don’t think them back legs are enough to support all of that weight there, at least without much, much stronger leg muscles. He must spend most of his life lying down! With a body like that, I’d probably put another pair of feet on him, or move the two feet he has upwards underneath his wings.

Center of gravity problem and Including all above suggestions in the post here is mine for the wings. cause Wings look too weak specially bones. but I like the snake like neck shape :evilgrin:


Seconding both above posts. To resolve the centre of gravity problem you could also allow the wings to rotate forward and act as supporting forelimbs, or lengthen the tail to suggest more counterbalance, OR commit further to the snake aesthetic and actually have it lie down on it’s stomach as a resting pose.

I guess I should clarify what I meant by that pose being temporary. It was designed just to make it easy to place the rig. When standing normally he’d be more vertical with his chest over his legs, and when flying he’d have his legs tucked. He’d never really lean forward like that with his legs down at the same time. It’s probably a bit confusing to even show the test render with the current pose, as that is not at all how he will appear in the final render. His feet will be in roughly the same spot, but he’ll be standing more like this (pretend this dragon doesn’t have forelimbs):


Ok, rig is mostly done now so hopefully the body design makes more sense now:



To explain a bit further, this was never meant to be a creature that was terribly graceful on the ground. I imagine he’d move either slowly stumbling while standing upright, or by laying down on his wings and crawling (Smaug in the hobbit movies does this). Or just jump and glide where he needed to go.

Like I said, this concept began life as the pokemon salamence, who does have front legs. But I gave up after never being able to figure out where on earth the wing muscles would go with front legs right there. I ended up dumping the front legs entirely

But the center of gravity is still off. There is no way he would be able to stand like that for a prolonged period without crashing to the floor. I don’t think he would even be ‘terribly graceful’ moving around because most of his energy would be spent pulling himself up off the ground before spending even more dawdling along. The pose you’ve presented there would be one like a cat on hind-legs looking over something. It’s by no means permanent.

As far as the front limbs are concerned; usually animals with rear legs have some kind of limbs on the front anyway (usually a pair of legs or, for upbright animals, a pair of arms.) Yours looks odd for this reason because it’s missing both.

Yeah, current standing pose just makes it look even less stable. If you look at other designs for bipedal dragons, they tend to be very svelte around the midsection, with large and long legs, but your dragon is basically a cylinder; a cylinder where 60-70% of the volume is ahead of the tipping point. I think even just adding a longer, meatier tail would rebalance the design, something like this.


I really like the head, but the rest of the anatomy still looks to me like it should have 4 legs. The wings don’t look like they could function as support (like smaugs do) and I feel like they sit a bit to far back. The legs look to weak to get it airborne in my opinion…
It would look better with a heavier tail, as suggested, but I would consider changing the legs as well and make them digitgrade which would be better to get this heavy dragon into the air (i think)