This is inspiring. It will be closely watched 
@dracio: Thank you for your kind words. It sure helps my motivation
@viper: glad you like it. I try to post my progress in regular intervals.
tyrant monkey remarked on adding some muscles for the wings and dracio observed (quite correctly), that the head is too big for the body.
Well, this makes the dragon an intellectual type - all brain , no muscles
I tried to correct for these two inputs. The easy part was to shrink the head. The hard part was to add some muscles. Either I lack the experience or I am handicapped regarding spatial relationships and topology … ( and it was tedious work to do this without the mirror modifier).
Anyway, here is a 360° turntable (without the table) video of the dragon in a nice pose. (click on the image to view the video)
I am now deciding if I continue with the complete dragon’s rigging, or if I should start modeling Ara.
I keep you posted …
Very elegant dragon. Keep up the good work!
This project looks very interesting. I am excited to see its development. I’ve generally found that if you get away from making something mirrored, then it can help give it more character. And stress out too much about the muscles, I think you have an excellent start for you dragon!
@Asano: thanks for the encouragement.
@ithepie55: Yep, you are certainly right, but it’s still some tedious work :). I intend to introduce some asymmetry with the sculpting and texturing.
next update:
I decided to continue modeling and tackle Ara for the next time to come. I started with the face and tried to get some decent topology.
See below for a first approach. Still no ears and no detailing done so far.
Attachments
that dragon is really looking good, but jut to balance out his design a little you could make his hind legs a bit bigger
Well, thats interesting, for me the legs are still too big :).
Anyhow, right now I am having a problem with modeling Ara. I trashed my previous attempt after recognizing, that the model I had just doesn’t work and I have to seriously practice a lot more head modeling.
Also after seeing the blend file angela provided at the durian site gives me something to study.
There are a lot of head modeling tutorials out there, but they all lack (in my opinion) the deeper ‘why’ of doing things. You see a lot of put a loop here and do this modeling there, but I miss a concise overall plan.
I have now purchased a copy of Jason Osipas book ‘Stop Staring’, where a lot of these whys are explained. But I think all that does not substitute for real exercise and studying.
Interestingly, this is a parallel to the concept drawing phase. The dragon was surprisingly easy whereas Ara gave me headaches. And now the same in the modeling phase. I wonder if this could be a hint to something I am missing …
So I am now doing some homework on head modeling and will post again as soon I come up with something worthwhile to go after.
My guess would be your lack of human anatomy knowledge (genuinely knowing why the head is supposed to look like it does). Since human head is a real object it has to be more precise and replicate a real world human head, whereas a dragon is a fantasy being, which you create.
Anyway, I love the dragon and rocky environment (might grab some ideas from that one for my wip).
ha ha, you know I was looking at the dragon and I thought I must have got it wrong, the fact that he is only one colour made it kinda of hard to jugde things.
Maybe you might have mentioned this earlier but what kind of age group is your heroine in? Andrew Loomis head drawing book is a super reference because he has proportions set out for all the major age ranges from toddler, preteens, teens and adult.
While topology is important for rigging and making shape keys, form and proportions are what the audience see and pay attention to. I think the are a few things you could tweak with the proportions
:), yes that would be a highly probable candidate …
The age should be around 10-11, just not reached adolescence but more than a child.
Thanks for the book tip. The proportions in my abandoned model are just wrong and starting from scratch will help it in the end - i hope 
My next attempt at Ara.
After some studying and quite some fresh starts I settled on the following workflow. I used a topology as template and modelled a rough head conforming to this topology. Then I adjusted the model to fit the drawings I had for Ara.
The result so far isn’t stellar but I am now more confident that I can reach a state, which satisfies me and is able to portray an Ara I have in mind.
The eyes and the area around the eyes are still missing and will be the next major test on my patience
See the attached images for the current state. The hair shown here is just for visualization purposes. I plan to do the final hair with a hair particle system.
Attachments
Nice. definately has the 11 year old look to it.
Now put some eyes in that thing! 
Quick update.
I spent some time getting towards a satisfying eye area.
Still some tweaks to do, also in the chin area, but I thought I’d share a shot.
[edit: added a lighter version with some additional tweaking done to the model]
Attachments
The render is a little bit dark, but from what I can see it is looking good.
wow I just have to say your amount of planning and dedication is amazing…i read one post after another more and more amazed. very nice job. i’ll be watching this thread.
nice work ioramel, I am really getting inspired to try my hand at making an animated short.
on to the main event.
I think her head is really coming out well, she also has a distinctive character of her own. She looks kinda of sad. some things that could be tweaked or corrected.
the neck topology could be worked on I think you should model in the loops of the sterno-cleido mastoid ( the big diagonal neck muscle) it really subtile and kinda of hidden in young girls but it pops out when you turn you head to one side.
you could tweak the bridge of the nose a bit, this is kinda of hard to describe without a paintover.
the last point I think is that your head could be a little narrow. the width arcoss the eyes of the head is about 5 eyes across. one eye width on each side of the eyes, the eyes themselves and one eye width between the eyes.
cheers
Hey, thanks a lot for your input tyrant monkey, very much appreciated !
Yes, you are right. I am glad this shows. The basic ‘idle’ expression should be a a tad on the sad side. Not surprising, considering the things she experienced and is about to in the short.
You are right here. This is a region where I haven’t done any real modeling so far. I playing with the idea of ‘cheating’ and using a makehuman model for the rest of the body, but I will have to look into this before I decide.
Want to do a paintover over one of the images I have attached here? I would really like to have your input on this.
The total width of my current model was quite exactly 5 eyes wide, but the eyes themselves had too wide a distance. What I did now was to bring the eyes more together, leaving the total width o the head untouched. See the attached images for the current state.
Attachments
Awesome to see so much progress, loramel.
(I finally got the laptop now, sorry :))
The dragon’s damn neat, It must be hard adding muscles and keeping you’re dragon as female-like as possible.
I’ve read throughout the whole thread.
I simply love your character design, Ara’s sketches are good, she has got character.
I love the big sunken eyes.
If you’re aiming for age 11 her nose shouldn’t be that tall, neither should her head.
as for the animatics… naah, that’s still a long way to go
Keep up the good work!
I’m following your progress.
Claus
@claus: hey, glad to hear you finally got your laptop. Now on to great ventures …
Right now there is not so much modeling progress, as I wish there would be. I started working on the rest of Ara and that triggered some interesting side effects:
-
I needed a reference for a young (child) girl. Well, as male adult searching for such images in the net … not so good an idea. In the end I found some nice images of my daughter.
-
As the body will be mainly covered by cloth I evaluated the option to skip modeling the body and only model the dress. This turned out into some side investigations on the cloth system and how to best setup this best for animation. In the end I returned to modeling the body. The dress will have to be modeled too of course. To do the actual animation I will use the same deforming bones on the dress as I use on the body, so I should see a rough cloth behavior during animation. When everything is ok I’ll activate the cloth simulation.
-
The investigation of the cloth triggered another one - the hair. I wanted to have Ara wear some kind of hair ring, which sits on top of the hair. I had no chance to get this to work in a believable manner. I can’t sculpt the hair in a way that it wont pass through the ring or Ara herself. Right now I am considering removing the ring altogether and have Ara wear open hair.
No update without images, though :). See below a shot with Ara wearing real hair. Very preliminary of course, but I had to build up some motivation after these partly frustrating side steps.
Attachments
That is very natural and very pretty looking hair, I think! Still a little rough maybe, but I wish I could get results like that. My experiences with hair have been… well let’s just say that most of my men have been bald in all of my projects. Anyways, just a thought, depending on the type/mood of short you’re making, you could make some sort of angelic halo going around her head? Just a wild thought, and you can take it or leave it, but I just got the thought that that might look cool. Excellent progress so far!