I’d like to show you my last cration… a dragon Comments and critics are welcome. I’m working on the UVMap right now, trying to give him a decent skin… then I’ll have to rig him, which is a pain in the a… erm, which is really painful, since our animator just left us so I’ll have to do it myself…
The dragon is going to be part of my studio’s demo reel. We already have an important client waiting for it, and others will receive it too, so we hope to be one of the first to use Blender professionally for feature film visual effects.
That should be great, since from the day we founded the company (two years ago) to today, we didn’t have a single “real” job… we suffered a lot, as did our financial status, but I’m confident it’s gonna change, and soon.
Let me know what you think about the model!
Cheers,
Seb
P.S.: BTW, if there’s anyone willing to help me rig and animate the dragon, s/he’d be more than welcome. I can’t offer any payment right now, but if the job will be satisfying, there’s a serious opportunity to become part of our team and earn some bucks in the future.
First off, I love your logo! That aside…if I knew how to rig…I would, but I dont, so I wont. It doesn’t seem too difficult to rig, unless you want each individual section of wings to move and the fingers to move and what not. I think it would be a good idea to figure out what animation is needed. if you just going to have him fly across the screen then it would be over kill to right the fingers and what not. But like I said, I haven’t…so it is just an opinion. Keep up the good work.
Like mentioned above it depends alot on what type of animations you want. Please give us a short run-down on what sorts of movements it is supposed to do. I did already some rigging and a bit of animations with dragons but this is concerning games models, which have different requirements ( including realtime interactive animations ).
Anyway, right now he’s gonna be part of a more or less static shot, where he’ll just fly across the screen (I’ll post the shot later today, if you want - it’s a camera mapped matte painting done in Blender as well) so there are not many details needed for animation. Let’s say wings + mouth + tail + neck would be enough.
However, I was thinking about getting a more complex animation done later, and integrating it in a live action shot… so it would be great to have a more complex rig for a closer shot too…
That’s it - as I already said, if there’s anyone interested I’m here
That’s fairly easy. Just create an armature with the first bone beeing at the center of the body pointing towards the head. Then one or two bones around the hips and the shoulders. One bone for each wing connected to the shoulder bone. For neck I would say roughly 5 to 7 bones with non-uniform spacing ( towards head smaller ). The same for the tail but roughly 12 to 15 bones there ( long tail ). Mouth is also simple ( where the back bulge is in the head ). More tedious gonna be painting the vertex weights. Dragons tend to have lots of vertex weights to look somewhat good ( I’ve seen no CG dragon yet which looked very good ).
Yeah, I know what I am supposed to do… in theory… however I feel it would be much better to find someone with more experience in rigging and animation to help me out… Time is a major factor now, we need to get him flying as soon as possible, besides, having a new team member would help us in the future too… I can’t imagine having a big feature project to do “one-man-band-style”
I guess I could help out a bit with the actual rigging…Im not very good with weights(big problem for a creature with skin like this) But I could get down a basic rig, and Im a pretty fast/good animator. I dont know wut exactly yoiud need help with, and I dont have tons of time, but let me know if i could be of help.
Peac eman, love the model
Drew
Due to bandwidth problems I had to remove the *.mov from my server. I’ll see if I can upgrade our bandwidth and get it back online. If anyone wants, I can still put it somewhere else
Dragon looks good, would like to help you but just can’t find any time for my work…
Can’t wait to see textures on your dragon!
If you can, put your movie somewhere, would like to see it. Hope that is Slovenija on the pic
Im a little busy at the moment(just started a fairly large project) so i dont kno if Ill still be able to help much, but as for your video, you can host it for download(free of charge) at sites like savefile.com .
I’ve seen the direct file before you added it up there. You want to make this bugger to fly across there? In this case getting the constantly jittering camera synchronized in your scenery is by far the much bigger problem than getting this bugger rigged and weight painted. Or do you plan to record a sequence with a steady camera?
Yeah, the camera movement is fine, but the up and down jerking wold be hell for animation( seeing as we dont have any camera tracking calculations for it). Maybe some smoother video at a steadier pace, but this would be a lot of work.
But is it “correctly” animated? You have here a 3D recognition problem in that you have to deduce camera parameters ( yaw, roll, pitch ) from a 2D image on a per frame basis. Sure you can add random jittering to the blender camera but this is not required to line up with this given movement in the video. It might look like a “picky” point but the human vision tends to notice irregularities ( as this has been required to survive in nature in the old ages ) quickly.
It surely is, since everything you see there is modeled and rendered in Blender from the source photo. I already trying putting the non animated dragon in, and it worked perfectly.
Even if it was live footage, I could motion track it on the fly. I might not be a good animator, but I’m a hell of a tracker
Ah ok, in that case it should be not a problem. Thought you want to make a mix between live video and rendered content. In that case you would have been into a hell.
Thanks, that’s a compliment for me If you think my matte painting animation looks like real footage, that means I did a good job animating it
Anyway, it would not really be a hell - I’d just track the 3D camera with SynthEyes, import the camera to Blender and ta-daaaa, it would be perfectly matching the movement
I started animating the dragon, learning something new is not really that bad anyway… I’m using a combo of shape keys & armatures, we’ll see what I can do
Comments and critics are welcome. I’m working on the UVMap right now, trying to give him a decent skin… then I’ll have to rig him, which is a pain in the a… erm, which is really painful, since our animator just left us so I’ll have to do it myself…
