I started this pretty girl about 6 months ago when a user group buddy was trying to figure out how to make a dragon, so I made a dragon. The first pass got all the way to retopo, textures, and rig, and then I realized I hated the beaky face. Also the retopo was too high poly. Also all the rigify stuff broke with 4.0, since we now have rig layers and whatnot. So then it got abandoned for a few months, and now I’m going to redo the head, retopo, UVs, textures, and rig…sigh…
My sculpting process from there is a big remesh, then sculpting with continuous separate chunks. I rely heavily on masking, Mask Slice to New Object, object switching with Alt Q, and remeshing to low poly blobs with R and Ctrl R. I think of this as akin to “ecorche” sculpting with clay. Another benefit is that since the blobs are all low poly, I can sculpt on my laptop, but the blobs create nice concave shapes that would otherwise be a frustrating Crease/Pinch high poly mess. Bulgy muscles and bony ridges are much easier. (previous crappy head pictured below)
Wow, I haven’t seen the technique of going from grease pencil to curves to sculpting meshes! I do most of my sculpture bases with a skin modifier, but then again I have never made something as complex as this dragon. It looks great!
Retopo time. If you’ve never used Exoside, it’s the best, but it only goes so far. This is what I usually do for clean up start, try to get at least 1 easily selected edge loop per major limb. So I find the loop that’s like 90%, delete faces going the wrong way, and retopo that by hand. Also cleanup on the line of symmetry. For the face I’ll merge this with a higher poly quad remesh, plus extra custom retopo there
