Dragon

For this Dragon assignment I spent quite a bit of time researching. I used to draw dragons, but I hadn't done it in a couple of years and I've certainly never attempted to model or sculpt one. It was an interesting challenge. 

I looked at different dragons, remembered about some of my favourite dragon artists I used to follow years ago, looked at some more recent inspirations such as the Game of Thrones dragons and dug out some of my childhood memories with books such as the Dragonoly. I even found the dragon figure I own and posed that for reference. I was very tempted to go with something similar to Toothless , but I thought I should stay away from the adorable creatures this time and do something different. 

From the start I made the decision that I want to make my own base mesh. I didn't feel confident enough to just jumps straight into MudBox and try to use the lizard or the T-Rex as a base like some of the others did. I thought it would be a nice exercise for me to do it in Maya anyway. 

So I made my side view, but by the time I finished designing that, I was too eager to start modelling. That's why my front view turned out to be a silly 30 second doodle, just for scale reference. Later I thought I could have benefited from a top view as well, but it still worked at the time. 

I started modelling from a 12 sided cylinder, much like I did for my human avatar we made recently. In fact I even followed a bit of the tutorial I used for that to do the legs the same way the arms were on the human mesh. It all worked surprisingly well. I managed to keep it low poly and still make it look decent. The back legs were tricky, but quite interesting to do. And surprisingly, the head was fairly easy to do.My only regret is that I didn't do the wings and the ears as separate objects. I thought I could keep it as one whole, which just resulted in a lot of mess, especially on the wings.

After I finished the base mesh, which took me 2 days, I was finally ready for sculpting. I tweaked the general shapes and then found some textures and stencils to use on it. Mudbox is not a software I use very often, but I tried my best to remember what I know and put it into practice. I even experimented with the posing tools and tried changing the wings a bit, but that didn't go too well. 

I didn't get to finish this assignment properly, but I got some fantastic feedback on it. I know what to look out for next time I sculpt and what kind of textures I should be looking for to use. I learned a lot and I still feel quite proud of the base mesh I produced as I did that all by myself.