Just quick post. I spent a little bit of time this morning making a helmet for the dragon, however I dont think I will continue working on is as I feel it ruins the look.

Good news, I've given myself more work to do! not only I'm I co-directing a CG short film, I'm also co-directing a VFX short film! 

Myself and the other two students I'm co-directing with were approached by a VFX student and asked whether we would be interested in creating our film into a VFX short instead. We could not because we had already done so much work on the CG short, but to compromise we agreed to make a roughly 20 second long VFX short parallel to the CG short.

I have been assigned to draw up the story-boards, they are not complete but it was just something quick to get the story across.

I thought that I should try out a bit of rigging to see what I've gotten myself into! I'm using 'The Set-up Machine' as it is apparently easy to pick up for those that have no experience as a rigger. 

Here I have set-up the bone structure underneath the mesh, it was very easy to get the hang of it once I had a play around.

I encountered a problem with the mesh not connecting to the rig, but I then realised I hadn't told the rig to use the mesh to rig to!

Right, so after posting my progress so far on 'CG Coach' I had some realy good feedback on a few things that I'd overlooked. 

I originally had the horns curving downwards, but it was pointed out that in real life, if the horns were in that position the dragon wouldn't be able to eat, because the horns would be in the way! Which I completely didn't realise, so now that curve upwards.

The head is a bit too flat and the top for how wide it is, so I can either make it more rounded at the top, or make it narrower. I think I will make it more narrow as I feel it will give a better effect.

The neck was too short and tapered, it get chunkier as it got towards the shoulders. this made it feel detached from the rest of the body, so I've made i a bit longer and gotten rid of the taper.

Over the past few days I've been sculpting the high detail definition into the dragon. I've used a mixture of the basic brushes, clay, and slash, as well as alphas to the rough skin texture and feel. It still needs a lot of tidying up, especially around the neck and torso areas, but it's starting to shape up nicely.

I'm trying to get the different skin surfaces of his chest, torso and stomach to work well together. however it is proving to be rather difficult. The stomach feels a bit too wrinkly, perhaps and the neck needs to blend in with the chest more sublty.

i spent a long time yesterday on getting the right look and feel of the leg, adding the tough skin areas on the tops of the feet and shin have worked well, I used an image of a T-Rex as reference.

I've spent a bit of time playing around with what sort of definition I'd like in his face and body, as I've mentioned before I'm trying to get an alternate dragon design. So instead of covering him in scales I'll cover him mostly in thick leathery skin and make his chest almost exoskeletal, and have the crystal in the centre of his chest, like a glowing heart.

His eyebrows feel a bit too low to me, and his nostrils could also do with a bit more definition.

I'm trying to get him to look lean and strong so I've mapped in some muscles, they are a bit too defined at the moment (he feels a bit like a body building dragon!) but I can tone them down using the layer opacity feature.

Dragon Build Cont...

At the moment I'm trying to get the shape of the body and face to fit well together. I've been testing out whether  or not to add little spikes in various places on his face, I'm not really too happy about the result however. It feels like he has jewelry across his eyebrows which is not the look that I'm going for! 

I've also spent a while shaping his teeth, I wasted a lot of time trying to get the gums in the right position and then add the teeth. I then realised that dragons don't have gums...

Getting the shape of his chest has been a bit of a challenge as It kind of feels like a human torso. However I did not want to go for a traditional dragon shaped torso, so I'll play around with it and see what I can do.