This is a first look at the project. All Material and textures except the flames are preliminary, just enough to let me establish a lighting plan so I can tailor the final Materials to the scene lighting. I’ll be adding the female acolyte later on.
The dragon mage’s base sculpt is done. I’ll be taking it into Sculptris for finishing off in detail prior to a normal map bake. The model has a basic “posing armature” that wouldn’t be ideal for animation but does just fine for setting poses for stills. The sinuous neck & tail were a bit of a challenge, but it turns out a plain ol’ IK chain works fine as long as the bones are well-planned. I played around with a Spline IK constraint but it didn’t perform all that well, though maybe I didn’t set it up properly.
Detail at full rendering res (1080p for the full final image).
Lots of slow progress, mainly with materials &textures but some sculpting on the landscape as well. Still very much a WIP, I plan to do higher-rez sculpts in Sculptris of the cave wall & floor, though I don’t think the dragon needs it given the way the materials are working out. Blender has plenty of sculpting power for the dragon’s major features, and the fine detail is bump-mapped in, though I may bake the normals to a tangent map for the final version. But the rocks need much finer sculpted detail I think.
I have a pose armature fabricated & tested but won’t be doing the final pose until I get the female acolyte figure at least placed in the scene, so I can establish the pose and eyelines for the two.
Thanks for the comments & crits, people! Some good points made, and changes also made as a result. The tail is now a lot less thick though the vertical cross-section, the rear of the torso not so bulky. I’ve also advanced the skin material quite a bit, much nearer to a final form, though I’ll likely hold off on the finishing touches until the entire scene’s more complete, so I can keep all in balance. Scales were mentioned in one comment, but in this case, I’m going more for a leathery skin base with a lot of warts rather than traditional dragon scales.
The landscape sculpture took quite a while, as I bounced back and forth between Sculptris and Blender. In the end the final shaping was in the big B’, and the UV mapping done in Sculptris (at least at this point). I need to add a great deal more small detail in painted diffuse & bump maps for both the cave floor and the wall. I tried Sculptris’ bump map option and found it wanting, particularly since it writes to a tangent normal map instead of greyscale height map, which makes retouches problematic.
The aged bronze material for the torch objects has great color and surface finish but they need their own lights, just a little something to bring out the form and color more. I already have a pile of Lamps in this scene, what’s 2 more?
BTW, this is not the final pose, but the model’s rest position, so once I bind it to an armature I’ll be matching the pose of the panting, with some embellishments.
The cave and cave floor/ground textures took quite a while, only able to work on it now & then, but it got done eventually. The “hill” in the BG right will get a different texture to help increase the sense of distance, plus some trees and/or foliage. Not sure if I’ll be adding the pagoda that was part of the 2D painting, that’s a lot of work for what will basically be a silhouette.
Adding the female figure is next on the list, but I have to costume her first. Or, maybe not?
The pagoda turned out to not be all that difficult in its basic form, which I ended up elaborating on with mesh edits but I’m using only simple Materials, since it’s so heavily obscured. I may refine it even more later on.
At full render size, the pagoda still works OK but another layer of small detail will improve the sense of scale, I think. Very hard keeping it from looking miniature given the forced perspective and the fog/defocus effects.
Got the acolyte figure in an posed and clothed, though she still needs eyebrows & lashes. The hair was a total pain, but only the ponytail for some dang reason! The main mass and bun modeled quickly and lit well, but that stupid ponytail just defied getting any kind of proper lighting on it. It’s still not right, though about the best I could manage. For some reason, it always wanted to appear lit backwards, with the highlights on the shadow side of the hair mass, and the side toward the light looking in complete shadow. Even with a custom Lamp for just the ponytail, it would not light correctly. I may have to paint in some highlights on the final render.
The Dragon Mage’s whiskers modeled pretty fast but I discovered that the Particle mode Mirror tool seems to be broken, or works so differently from 2.49b that I can’t suss it out. But more problematic is the radioactivity they show! I’m using an Indirect Light setting of 5 to build a high degree of light interactivity between surfaces, but those whiskers are positively glowing for some reason. Usually you have to set the Emit value up quite a bit to see this, but Emit is at zero for this hair shader. Maybe it’s because the Saturation of the Diffuse is very steep, but that’s needed to get a rich red to the color. Any suggestions about how to knock that red spill down by a major factor?
Not sure about the emit issue, but I wonder if you could set it to its own render layer to isolate with a lamp for itself if that would help. I’m not certain, since you are looking for that interaction to begin with.
I’ll be setting this aside for a time so I can come back with “fresh eyes” and see if any small tweaks need be made in Photoshop, mainly in the area of color timing, but I’d also appreciate any feedback from the community.
I’m obviously not trying to portray a “traditional” dragon, but rather one that embodies both Oriental draconic features (broadly interpreted – I have an artistic license for that! ) and a strong dose of of “humanity” in its personality.
My thoughts on the “narrative” to the original painting (see post #1 in this thread) were that the young woman has traveled to meet a fabled “Dragon Mage” in hopes of become its acolyte, and finds that the name is not metaphorical! While in the painting the Dragon Mage is somewhat threatening, I wanted this version to portray calm wisdom rather than a hint of peril.
Be sure to zoom in on the “detail” image to its native size, as that is where the max detail is best viewed.
If anyone’s interested in a technical breakdown on the image, just say the word.
