The How To Train Your Dragon trilogy are my favorite movies of all time. I love the story, the characters and the world they are located in. This is my take on one of their main characters Toothless.
It was a little hard to put together the final look. I gathered lots of references from all movies and Toothless’ appearance slowy changed through the movies so I kinda picked the features I liked the most.
Sculpting, modeling, rigging and rendering were done in Blender. Texturing was a mix of Blender and Substance Painter. Specially when using UDIMs, I could do all hand painted work in Blender and send it to Painter to use as a base. Funnily enough, Painter started supporting painting across UDIMs a few days back but at the time I was making this it was not possible
UDIMs helpt me have enough resolution on all parts of the body, to get that detail in there. Even though he is not 100% black, and there is color variation, most of the surface work is done by displacement and roughness maps.
Rigging was a challenge too, I have been rigging characters lately and coming up with efficient ways on how to attach things to them, but in here his gear was more mechanical/functional and yet had to be attached to the body. That being said I had to figure out a way to attach all the gear to the body, to follow the body movements and yet being able to tweak anything.
Thanks to this project I also learned that making wings is a complete nightmare
but I found out a way to close and open them nicely, mixing shape keys, bone actions and simple bone controls.
This is amazing! I love the Dragons trilogy too! Great work, I especially love the incredible detail you spent on the textures. Very nice. I almost mistook him for the one in the actual movie.
This is stunning! Nice work. Also, I appreciate your thorough description. It’s useful (and inspiring) to see how other artist go about their projects.
Impressive. I love and adore the movie trilogy the most, too! So, I’d say this is pretty spot on!
I wonder if you could do a tutorial on making him, so I could maybe follow along in the process and learn the things to make a HTTYD dragon character, if you want to do it. I’d love to make something like a short fan animation of it sometime.
I am working on some learning material, so maybe anytime soon I will be teaching how to aprove these kind of projects. But making a special one for HTTYD dragons sounds like a nice idea. But definitely it would be after finishing this other thing first. And thanks! I am happy you like it!
Hey, I know it’s been a while, but I’d really love to see how you managed to pull this off! If you’d release the project for educational purposes, I’d really like to experiment with the rigging and textures on it! Thanks for the time
but at the time I was making this it was not possible
maybe with time in the future.
