Hmmmmmm…
The difference is very slight, but I vote for the 2nd one 
Numb’a three for mee. Great job. Although, it might be a tad better (in my opinion anyway) if you turned down the specularity a tad bit.
Yep just have not saved it with specularity turned down will mess with that some more after the mesh is complete
wing update
specularity turned down and changed some other stuff
other test
Nice!
Very few people can do decent organics without lots of time 
Test - Rigging
learned how to make it from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvjJq_XzaGo
and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnTp-CjmC18
Great work for your first model (if it’s really true), i must say that i am quite jealous, you seem to have a natural talen for this. Did you have a look at this: http://www.blendercookie.com/2010/06/17/series-stylized-dragon-part-1/ ? Even if you’ve got the modeling part down, it could help you with materials and lightning.
Thanks for the link looking at the Video right now.
Looking good, man.
Looks so cute with the background <3…
& you seem to have made a nice rig with the wings :yes:, are you making an animation? :eyebrowlift:
Not sure if I will make a animation - Right now I am just learning how blender works 
update
It looks like you’re eliminating a lot of your triangles, which is good. If you do animate it, this will give you less pinching in your deformations. Keep going, man. It’s looking good.
Also, sometimes it’s difficult to see the details of a black model, especially with the specularity turned down. It might help, just for the modeling stage, to turn on/up the environment lighting in your world settings. A value of 1.0 might be too much but it’ll help you/us see the forms of your model better.
Is that image from blender 2.5
Here is the status on the model
- The Wing Skin - Should it be a plane or connect on both sides??
- Eye socket / eye lid needs redone.
- Inside of mouth needs redone.
- Spikes and claws need added.
- It needs texured.
- The rig needs to be completed.
subsurf is off because it kills the wings…
looks like the wing skin might be a plane
but if its a plane that makes it non manifold and thats why subsurf does not work right
There are two ways: Add another loop of edges near the one that gets killed as you say, or crease the edges that get killed (this is done in the panel that pops up when you press N) in edit mode. Ask if you don’t understand.
I have the Art of How to Train your Dragon, great book- they mention the difficulty of creating such skin materials that will look good on screen- I wish you luck, and nice model! The book mentions that they wanted it to look more velvety with some irridesence, maybe look into Pablo’s tutorial here.
The best thing to do for the wings is to give them a thickness, even if Dragon wing membranes are a thin surface in spots.
Doing this will avoid normal problems with subsurf and not mess up the normals when you need to recalculate them.
Working on the eye socket / eye lid
I know its hard to tell with the other images I posted but it was a big mess by the eye.
Yes. If you’re working in 2.49, a similar setting (which is also in 2.5) is Ambient Occlusion.
It’s kinda hidden but if you make sure you’re in all the areas I’ve circled, you should be able to find it. This is also where you change the background colors of your render so it isn’t that hideous default blue. 