yatw (yet another dragon wip)

[dandan]

Looks promising, but i would take down the spekular and gloss of the horns, and maybe increase it on the skin. Nice modeling!

[Ibah]

nice start. not much to crit in such an early stage.. textures need some work, better spec/ reflection. and he could use some moist at the base of the teeth.. some greece lip thickness there maybe also, now his teeth come out of nothing.

hope to see more of it;)

[alex.h.]

i like thatone its going to be interesting to see the rest, great work. :thumbsup:

[Tawneycocker]

Das ist goot! What I see here is an animal that I should very much like to have done. As far as I am concerned one just can't do enough dragons! as to the horns the malovency of his look requires that we see both the horns and the teeth. It's a Kantian imparitive. Why did you use brown instead of red, white, blue, or green ( the writers of the pacific rim set personalities for those colors) this fellow is the thesis for the Greek dra'gon or deciever) He is definatly up to some thing. prima! Tawneycocker

[logotomie]

After a long time i finaly found some time to work on it again. I started the body. I also worked a tiny bit on the textures. You might take a look at the texturing in my other thread (female char) as this and the other wip wil merge at some point

Its brown because its more of an earth creature for me. I am not so much a fan of the AD&D color scheme for dragons, i never quite managed to imagine a multihued dragon :-).

For the teeth i used alligators as reference (alligators were my starting point for the head, but i think i moved away quite a bit :-) So he will not have lips covering the gum.
http://www.janjordan.de/images/dragontest.jpg

[mjkennedy]

Nice dragon! Im a sucker for dragons! :thumbsup:

But a few crits. Firstly, I agree with a previous post on the point of color. His face and body suggest your classic, bad A55, "Smog" type dragon... that being said, Id love to see him in red. BUT, if for some reason you're going to a more realisic dragon (such as Framestore's take on dragons in Dragon's World), then brown is good.

As well concerning his face, his eyes look rather small, and those horns could use some bump/ randomization.

Finally, I dont know how large his wings are, but for such a large dragon, he would definately need HUGE wings to support flight. Any chance you could get a few more screen caps from different angles, showing his full wing span?

But again, still a fantastic job. Cant wait to see it done!

Matt

[logotomie]

Okay, okay :-) might do a red version too.

As for realistic flying... what wingspan would you see as realistic for a 10 ton dragon ;-)
more images to come when i am finished with unwraping

[mjkennedy]

I would think that each wing should be close to, if not the whole length of his body. I'm a little bias though, cause I really like big wings on a dragon. While dragons are mythological creatures, I still think it looks rediculous when dragons have tiny wings they clearly would not be able to fly with.

That is of course, Im not calling YOUR dragon rediculous! :) But you catch my drift.

Matt

[logotomie]

increased the wingspan a little and did some more modelling here and there (experimenting a lot) I finally worked on the texturing. lots of areas still have preliminary textures/ are being worked on but you might get the idea.

i still work on the look of the horns material.

also a top and a sideview so you can get a better idea about the dimensions/proportions.
http://www.janjordan.de/images/drachentest_color.jpghttp://www.janjordan.de/images/drachentest_top.jpghttp://www.janjordan.de/images/drachentest_side.jpg

[thE-AzRaiL]

very good ! i like it , texture is realy nice !

[myfadingmuse]

wow:) amazing stuff!

[mustan9]

Wow! Amazing man!

Please help me out! How did you do the textures on the head and the horns. I love those horns!

[D-Red]

wow, the texturing is awesome

i need to know how to texture

amazing :thumbsup:

[mookid2005]

This is an amazing model! the texturing is fantastic too!

looking at the physique of this guy, his legs look too thin to support the weight of his body, let alone those enormous wings. Also, is the tail a little short?

:thumbsup:

[logotomie]

thank you all :-) tonight i might write a bit about the texturing process.

mookid2005: you are not the first to point me at the thin legs, i will fix it. although i wont give him the elegant looking strong legs of D-Reds excellent D&D like Dragon. Strangely i dont find the legs to thin in the perspective rendering, but when i look at the side view...

[mustan9]

That would be great. Many thanks!

[logotomie]

This and my other wip are my experimental projects. Thats why the progress is so slow. I do the texturing a bit differently then i do it most of the time. we will see if it works out :-). I only use Max and Photoshop for this.
So here some of the details of the texturing process:

As always texturing starts with unwraping/laying out the uv space.I am not a fan of unwrapping complicated shapes. so i decided to do separate unwraping for different parts of the body. This normaly results in seams between the different parts which are often hard to cover. I use the ability of max to assign more then one uv space to every polygon so i can do different mappings for different body regions and blend between 2 textures in an overlaping region. here an example for the blending of body and front leg texture (red texturing variant test for the leg :-) :
http://www.janjordan.de/images/blending.jpg
The horn texture is completely handmade in photoshop. But because i am not good in completely making up the look i searched for a refference and found the teeth of a wild boar which had a cool look:
http://www.janjordan.de/images/Keilerwaffen.jpg
And i basically used the colors of it and painted a texture (this is the current version, muchmore noisy then my original variant which looked more like the reference)
http://www.janjordan.de/images/horn2.jpg
This is a scaled down version of my face texture (side):
http://www.janjordan.de/images/skin.jpg
ugly, isnt it? :-) This is a nearly planar mapping from the side which makes painting the textur much easier imho. The seams with other parts of the head are obscured with the blending methode i mentioned earlier. This texture is mostly a composite of different animal skins (elephant, aligator, tortoise, rhino) and some handpainting (mostly darkening and lighting up ) The region around the eye is clearly a rhino :-)

I have a bump map too. I dont use shininess at all, i dont like standard shading methodes (blinn and the like) very much. its all mimicked by a reflection map controlled by a falloff map (shadow/light)

The rendering is touched up a bit in photoshop afterwards, i added a "depth of field" effect and some reflection glow.

So....did this make a bit of sense?
good night ya

[mustan9]

I totally understood everything. Thanks so much.

You have impressed me. I think your getting better results with Photoshop then I am in ZBrush. The more I work in ZBrush the harder it is to get the details you get working in Photoshop. Mostly the UV mapping is spread out over the bitmap to much and things become pixelated.

Great tutorial. Thanks buddy!

[D-Red]

Truly Awesome,

This is goning to help me a lot :thumbsup: , i still have so much to learn about 3d, espeicaly texturing, seems the more i learn the more there is to know.

great tutorial, it's brillient too see how you go about the whole process in general.

it given me a lot to think about

cheers mate

[sandrich]

After a long time i finaly found some time to work on it again. I started the body. I also worked a tiny bit on the textures. You might take a look at the texturing in my other thread (female char) as this and the other wip wil merge at some point

Its brown because its more of an earth creature for me. I am not so much a fan of the AD&D color scheme for dragons, i never quite managed to imagine a multihued dragon :-).

For the teeth i used alligators as reference (alligators were my starting point for the head, but i think i moved away quite a bit :-) So he will not have lips covering the gum.
http://www.janjordan.de/images/dragontest.jpg

What rendering setup do you have in this shot. Like, what renderer, what kind of lights, settings, etc. Ive been wanting to figure out how to get this effect for quite some time now...

[logotomie]

this is the standard max renderer, with advanced lighting/photon mapping switched on. Then i have 2 spotlights and one skylight. the skylight uses the scene environment for getting the color. The scene environment has a gradient ramp as background texture (cylindrical environment mapped) The gradient is skyblue at the top and more dark redish brown at the bottom (to simulate light bouncing back from the ground). So its basically the poor mans hdri lighting :-)

[sandrich]

Thanks. I tried it, and have no clue how to do some of that. You think you can just put some quick steps?

[gunslingerblack]

nice classic representation of a dragon, keep going with this one, i'll be waiting to see how you finish it.

[mustan9]

Thanks. I tried it, and have no clue how to do some of that. You think you can just put some quick steps?

Here you go buddy. I already posted something like this in this thread.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=265839 (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=265839&highlight=sky)

[D-E-A-N]

great job man, the dragon looks awsome. :thumbsup:

i love the textures and thanks for sharing your technique, it`s always interesting to see how other artist work. can`t wait for a final scene of the dragon.

keep going. :)

regards,
dean

[AndrewHwang]

wow that dragon looks great. looks awsome, love the textures too especially on the horns.

[Jinian]

Awesome dragon there. My only crit is the texture on the face. The color seems fine but the bump details don't justify anything. I suggest making a normal map or displacement for the subtle details so it feels like it is coming out. The material and shader work also needs more attention for the face.

[logotomie]

Thank you all, its really nice to see so much interest in my little dragon project :-)

Awesome dragon there. My only crit is the texture on the face. The color seems fine but the bump details don't justify anything. I suggest making a normal map or displacement for the subtle details so it feels like it is coming out. The material and shader work also needs more attention for the face.

You are completely right. Unfortunately i dont have normalmapping in my max 5 version here and displacement is also very ugly with the standard max renderer. Maybe i will switch to mental ray sometime. Anyway, here is a small head material test. I basically took out all details from the color map and let the bump map do the detailing. i also changed the reflection map a bit. The bumps are still kind of random though..
http://www.janjordan.de/images/vergleich.jpg I still need to work on the gum and change some of the bump.
I am also thinking about completely switching to rendering in layers and composite afterward, also a fast test here. gives more controll, but i want to do an animation in the end. (i finished the skeleton and will do some quick linking and posing next) Dont know if i can pull this off in the end:
http://www.janjordan.de/images/composite.jpg
and finaly i did some modelling changes, stubbier legs, longer tail, some detailing here and there:
http://www.janjordan.de/images/drachentest_side2.jpg

Thanks. I tried it, and have no clue how to do some of that. You think you can just put some quick steps?.

What mustan9 did is exactly what i do. If you are still stuck drop me a PM and tell me where you exactly have trouble.

Many thanks again for all the posts!

[mustan9]

That's looking really good.

The bump mapping does add some detail, but without some reflections it's hard to see the bump details.

[gunslingerblack]

why did you change the claws, i liked the original ones better?

[Cleveland]

logotomie dude this is so good. no crits, just need you to rig 'im skin 'im and pose 'im in a nice scene

cleveland

[Stefan-Morrell]

he looks very impressive with the texture..well done!

[graphacks]

You know, I was embarking on a dragon model project, but seeing your WIP kind of crushed my ego. This is amazing. I feel unworthy.

Having said that, I think the body is too small for the thick neck and head. I like the thickened legs, but overall I feel like the body and legs don't match with the massive neck/head. Alligators/crocodiles have small legs, but the bodies are more massive.

Again, though, your modeling and texturing look fantastic, and I can't wait to see this progress! Oh, and I like the brown/gray coloring...no red necessary!

~D

[Smaw]

Woah.
I really love your textures. Modeling looks very good all around too.
If there's one thing I can point out about the modeling would be the fact that the area around muscle that is connecting the wing and the body looks a bit too simple. It just looks like a chunk of meat from three quarter view. Since that area is supposed to be most developed area of flying creatures, you usually expect to see more muscle development(more ripped into seperate pieces) in that area..
But then again, you might take care of that in zbrush, so all is well :)
Oh, and the skin of this dragon looks a bit too dry for a reptilian.

Keep up the good work! It looks really promising!! definitely subscribing to this thread.

[marcial84]

wow, cool! Not really any crit here, but just cool. Very interesting to look at. GJ.

[eosmusashi]

Woow i love dragons!!! And yours rule!!!

[Nayar]

hei man!
very very nice beast!:buttrock:

Fine modeling and texturing! Can we see some animation?

bye!

[logotomie]

Thank you a lot for all the kind replies :-) . Havent had much time to work on it recently, busy at work and not much time for personal projects. good thing is that we just bought max8 and i am currently playing around with mental ray (how i love the shading possibilities and working displacement feature of mr!) So you will hopefully see some updates soon.
There might even be an animation, i already rigged it quickly with character studio and it works surprisingly well (used additional bones for wings/jaw). Alltogether very little progress, but i post a small pic anyway. Thanks again!

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