Modeling Begins.

Modeling on the dragon for our piece is underway. I prefer block modeling to any other method, i feel creating basic shapes and extruding helps me keep control of polys and keeps the mesh neat. This way I avoid poly's with 5 or 6 sides.

I started with a poly cylinder and turnt it on it's side, then shaped the vertices. I then started work on the legs by extruding some of the faces outwards.

As you can see Ive lengthened the design considerably as the design didn't transfer well into 3d in terms of noodlely-ness!

SHOWREEL

Also in this term I have to create a dvd Showreel of my work for the upcoming raveLIVE event. This involves using software to create a DVD with functional menus and clips of my work. To start off I need to decide what I would like to place on my showreel. So i need to have a think about how I want to sell myself and what I am proud of. What artwork to include and if I need to re-render anything.

I think the first thing I need to look at is how I would like to market myself. I believe I would like to pursue a career in concept art and character design, along with modeling. These will be two things i would like to focus on in my show reel. However I do not have too much modeling work and not many original concept work. to remedy this i would like to include my life drawing. I will also showcase my animations as although, i do not wish to specialize too much in that field, I feel they show capability in Maya and reflect my personality via the humour in my pieces. I believe this is beneficial as a showreel is a medium in which an employer can get to know a possible staff.

I now have a number of things to do and organise. I need to go through my animations and models to decide what to showcase and check if any re-rendering will need to take place, I will also need to scan all my life drawing images and convert them into a digital format and organise which images i would like to showcase from them also.

Final Design

This is the final design which i will be modeling from for our knucker dragon.

I really like the final design, simple and clean, friendly but changes swiftly to mean. I especially love his long slinky body and short lizard-like legs.

We went with the red colour scheme as it should stand out from the green backdrop we are setting our animation. I also like this colour scheme as apposed to the others, mainly because i feel red appeals to children (our target audience) more so than the brown of dark teal.

Now we have finalized a design we can now move on to creating our final model and begin rigging.

concepts yeaaaah 2

So me and lydia discussed the previous concepts and decided that we both enjoyed the blue head. The issues that arose about it were that it looked a tad too feminine and we had to see what it looked like angry also. Just to be sure. So I came up with the concept. Luckily Lydia loved it, and this is the style of head we will be using on the final design. Now I can move on the this design and merge all our different limbs ect. together.

concepts yeaaaah

Here are some more concepts this time experimenting with colour also. I decided to focus on the limbs and head, this would be the most important designs as the body is narrow and long and there isn't too much change that can be made to this.

I have tried to create limbs completely different from each other to gain an idea as to how they can be portrayed completely differently. That way me and lydia can discuss what aspects we like about each one and compromise in the middle with the final design.

As you can see there is a fat leg and a thin leg, i personally like the fat leg more as it looks stronger and sturdier. The thin leg however has long claws with i do like, and i think i enjoy the patterning more on the thin leg.

With the wings i have created one which is completely seperate from the body, a whole new limb and one which connects to the body via the webbing. I like the latter as it's closer to the original design from the book and suits the body as a smaller wing. If we were to use the other then I think if it was used so small it would look strange and withered.

As for the heads I did the same again, creating two different shapes and styles and thought we would compromise in the middle. I prefer the green head, as the head flows with the shape of the neck and body. I like the eyes, as i feel they can change from angry to innocent easily with the pupils and brow. Now to get lydias opinions and creat some final designs.

MOAR RESEARCH!

Looking through some tutorials on the internet, we couldn't really find anything specific to help us modeling the type of dragon we wanted. It became clear that we would have to jump straight in and learn through trial and error. I was okay with this, as i feel i learn more through this process. Sure it's a longer journey but you can only learn to fix problems by creating them.

We did however find these shots on the internet, a lovely poly mesh of a modeled dragon.

I found these to be extrememely beneficial as it shows us how a drgon mesh can look. What is needed with edge loops ect. I loved looking at the wings, they look lovely and i'm assuming they used a simple bridging tool albeit with some adjusting to get the winds so simple and clean.

It has an incredible low poly body, with all the necessities added rather simplistically, in fact the only place on the mesh where there seems to be alot of geometry seems to be the head. But even that looks clean and rather lovely.

I feel this will help me as it will give me an idea of how much geometry is needed to create a model to standards that i would like. It also shows me how somebody else went about creating webbed limbs, which i had no idea about.

Additional Research.

We also looked at a Documentary from Animal Planet called Dragons made Real, unfortunately I cannot embed it into my blog, which is a shame, but here is a link to the first part, if you wish to watch it HERE.

The documentary itself is very interesting, and explains how Dragons could have existed, with scientific theories as how they achieved flight and breathed fire. Well worth a watch in my eyes. Lovely Dragon Models and CGI.

We also looked at Falcor from The Neverending Story as he his the same shape as our dragon. Unfortunately as the film is a little dated, the movement was so realistic and it wasn't really as inspirational as we thought it would be. Still Falcor rocks and deserves a spot on this Blog.