Dragon Flight

My first entry is my Dragon Flight animation.

I modeled, textured, rigged, animated and rendered the piece. The simulations of the membrane and tentacles were done by my boyfriend Colin Key.

The dragon design has been inspired by a book called A Wizard of Earthsea. The book is very closely attached to birds of prey, which is why I decided to make the dragon more eagle like. Eagles and condors are the biggest birds of prey, but the dragons are bigger!

Most of time I start creating rough sculpts in ZBrush to figure out my chreature design, but in this case I wanted to put a lots of detail into the dragon's face so I made a few head sketches first. I have chosen to go with the first head in the middle row.

The initial head sketch had had a lot of spikes, so I decided to simplify it a bit in the final sculpt.

The dragon body anatomy was quite challenging. My goal was to make a hexapedal creature which would still look correct and believable. I had decided to go with a T-rex arm style - small little arms underneath the wings. The wings also serve as front legs. The chest of the dragon is massive so that it can support flight.

Once my Zbrush sculpt was done, I exported the model to Maya and started doing retopo followed by UV-unwrapping.

After the model itself looked good, I started rigging it, which was challenging but at the same time lots of fun. The rig was mostly supported by ribbons so it turned out to be very flexible.

The rig is finished! Time to animate! Since I am a falconer, I have always had lots of fun animating flight cycles and this dragon was not an exception. The rig proved to be working very well with no issues whatsoever. 

After the animation, I started playing with lighting in Redshift until I liked it. I decided to use Redshift for its insanely fast GPU rendering. Then, all I had to do was to let it render... I brought my Drogo to life!