Hey Everyone,
So the story is this… This picture started as just a painting I did for pleasure. It wasn’t going to be something huge, just a fun picture. Simple right? Well it turned out to be really cool concept art. I stared at it for a while thinking it would be awesome in 3D except that it would take forever to build…I finally decided to knuckle down and actually model it out in 3D. Well that turned into a MASSIVE project that took at least a week+.
The modeling of the actual landscape was simple enough, then I went and took one of my older characters and changed her into something villager looking. She was already pre-rigged so that was easy to add.
The plants were … a mess. It was a mess. I couldn’t quite get what I wanted for the bushes until I went and followed This Tutorial on youtube and instead of flowers I added in leaves to make what looked like ivy. Then I added some tall grass with the bagapie addon as a geo-node to get a nice random look.
The Dragon took the longest of all the assets. I really wanted to make a nice looking dragon so I could use it in animation and creature study after this “small” project. I had to sculpt it out from scratch then retypologize for rigging with no reference at first. The legs looked wonky and more like tiger legs until I took reference from toothless (fan of How To Train Your Dragon), but everything else was off the cuff. Although at the end she ended up looking a lot like the lightfury. 
I rigged the wings and tail using this scaling method, after I spent hours trying to get it to work with rigify. The dragon rig is a eclectic mush of 3 rigs… a wing rig, a face rig and a body rig.
My computer was mad at me for making such a large scene, so I had to render this in three layers.
Long story short, it took way longer than I thought, but it turned out great. It was a fun challenge for me. Hope you enjoy!
Kaylee J