Hello there. I’m excited on creating a sort of… proof of concept animation. I would like to have a knight fight some sort of beast and i’m leaning towards a Wyvern which is pretty much a Dragon with 2 legs and bat wings in that it’s hands are located at the Apex of the wings. I wanted that type of monster because within a cave the beat will be crawling and climbing around alot rather than flying. And with the hands being part of the wings, it looks really cool when they run around d:
Anyway i was very excited while making the knight character and now that he is finished i moved onto the beast and i was immediately struck with that sense of “Wow how am i going to do this?”
I went looking for some images to use as reference and i found one i liked the most to use as a Base, which is this one.
(-Edit- Oh and don’t think i’m going for extreme detail. I’m not looking to make all the scales and what not. I might try and texture them, but over all i’m just trying to get something Basic and usable here.)
So then i really wasn’t sure how you would tackle something like this. I hear in many tutorials to block it out first, so i decided to do some box modeling.
The questions i ended up having are, should the actual wings attached to the arm be a flat plane? how should i go about making a dragon head?
Anyway, i’m rambling. here’s what i have so far… If anyone’s made creatures about like this before, tips would be appreciated ^-^
Thins to keep in mind with reptile modeling / animation is that they really don’t have facial expression. So head rigging and mesh layout can be kept simple. Mesh loop around the mouth, eyes, and nostros is the basic build. I made a simple Wyvern head starting from mouth loop here:
As for the body, the hip joint is too wide I think. If you look at Tyrannosaurus skeleton the hip is not that wide as in this photo. They have massive muscles but both legs are set close together. Most modeler / illustrator miss this point:
Even Kangaroo is built that way, with narrow butt bone:
You know i always feel that more welcome here on the forums when someone goes out of their way to work through the same thing i’m doing just to answer my question :’) I really appreciate that.
How you mentioned that you started modeling the head by the hole in the mouth first was a really fantastic idea on how to start the head and i think that really helped me. Perhaps if i made the circle for the holes in the eyes and nose at the start aswell that may have been good too. I can’t exactly say mine came out nearly aswell as yours did because i’m not incredibly with typology as it appears you are xD
I always find it hard to take something that has alot of typology and detail and attach it to something that doesn’t has as much such as the neck in this case. But i went and looked for something someone had showed me before when i was learning to model hands that showed how to create almost some sort of transformer in a grid to have one side end up with less vertices than the starting side. I used that technique to attach the head on mine and kind of hid the funky geometry under the jaw just in case.
I really liked what you said about how reptiles don’t have facial expressions… or very many.
I think i see what you mean by the hip bones. That is pretty contrary to what we would think of in our heads.
When i was looking at that reference image at first i was picturing how an artist draws creatures sometimes by starting with circles for areas like shoulders, hips, and what not. And it appears as if the sphere for the hip area is larger, but as you showed in the skeletal structure of the T- Rex and the Kangaroo, it’s surprisingly close together.
So i went in and sort of pushed them together with the proportional editing turned on, but i may need to tone it up a bit if i figure out what may look better.
And that was a really neat tutorial aswell sanctuary
I liked their method of creating the head aswell. They were really good at demonstrating how to make the bevl sort of factor while using only 1 reference image (:
o: that’s an excellent point, there are alot like bat wings o:
I had a feeling something was wrong with my wings anyway so i don’t mind going them another go d:
Time to look up reference images of bat wings… d: ew xD (well… depends on the bat i guess, furry ones are cute sometimes)
I know that didn’t take long but here is what i’ve learned. Before i heard that tip about the bat i was watching the rigging for the wings on Piero on Blender cookie (AKA putting rocket science to shame)
I found a poster online that demonstrates the locations of the bones within a human’s arm, a pterodactyl’s arm, a birds arm, and a bats arm. And it named each bone, and highlighted them, to represent the human equivalent. I took the Human Meta rig option in Blender for creating a fast IK human rig and isolated just the arms of it and placed the in the same layout as a bat’s arm (although the length of the upper arm can vary depending on the bat it seems, i might go for the longer variant now that i’m looking at it again.) So after generating the IK rig from rigify i found that it actually works miraculously well for a wing (without feathers if you’ve seen that Piero video)
And so now that i know a bit more about how the bat wing works and where the bones are set out i can probably more accurately go and create them now.
Here’s just the layout.
And excuse the terrible hand writing of the grease pencil. I literally got my very first drawing tablet just a few hours ago! and i have bad handwriting d:
You might want to check out the wing to body ratio for a few birds and animals.(Usually each wing is slightly longer then the animals length from head to tail)
Overall it doesn’t need to be overly accurate since it’s your model and there are no physically accurate dragons since they have never existed.
