I’ve finally reached the part when I can start adding colors and detalis to the model. I’d love to hear critique about it, since this is the first model I ever created with such complexity. My aim is to animate it, without any purpose, this is just for me to practice since this is what I’d like to do as a real job
in a few years.
Somehow the eye seemed to be off, so I looked up a bit and changed the eye to a more cat like one. I’m not sure about how this is gonna render tho, I’ll check it out soon. I finished adding detais to the metallic parts and to the horn and tusks, and the teeth. still a long way to go
A little more progress and the first render for the lowest subdivison without any map. There’s one thing that bothers me, I unwrapped the UV maps in maya, and planning to do animations with the dragon too, but I can’t find any help specifically about this topic. The whole model is made out of about 35 separate mesh, and unwrapped every one of them. Should I resize them to be able to fit the whole thing on a single UV tile, or having them all separated is fine? What would be the difference?
I started doing renders in arnold with maya, and tried to figure out how displacement maps work. I’m not sure if I’m doing it right, but the look is quite good so far. This was only a test, now I will cut the UV maps together now. I managed them so that the organic parts and the metalic parts are on different UVs.
I finally finished the displacement maps for the whole model. I wasted more than a day because I didn’t find a little button which would have merged my subtool UVs together, and tried to do it in photoshop. But today I found it, and was able to make these nice screenshots. The next step is rigging.
I’m working on rigging now. I’m not sure how it will look with the current topology, but this is what I got so far. Haven’t applied skinning yet.
The rig is done, this is the first pose I tried. It used to have those armpit wings, which I removed since it took way too much power from my laptop with nCloth, even if it was a really low mesh. I left the wings as nCloth, and skinned the guts in his belly(I was going to nCloth that too but my 7-year-old laptop told me not to do so). I will come up with an animation very soon, since the deadline for my portfolio entry to an university is coming really fast.
I’ve created this little animation for my portfolio to a university application. Not quite finished yet, there are parts which still need fix, but the time was short.