this tutorial shows how to model the dragon in this image. it only covers modeling, not texturing, materials or lightning. the tutorial might be useful not only for creating dragons, but different characters or beasts…
in this dragontools.zip you find zspheres models of the head, arm and legs i used. feel free to use them for your own dragon.
first, its very helpful to draw what you intend to model, or get some nice references. in my case i had drawn a rough form of what i want and some details of the head i wanted to have. its not necessary to do so, but helps to fix better the idea you have.
for the dragon head start with a zsphere model (1) to rough out the basic shape, notice that i used 3 attractor shperes. i used ires = 5, membrane = 38 and density =2. then i adaptive skinned (2) and started modeling. i usually begin in edit/move with large brush size to move big group of polys to the correct place, then with brush size 1 invidual polys. i use edit/draw in later modeling stage, when adding bumps, and holes… i try to stay low poly as long as possible so that i have not to move too many polys when correcting main shape (3 + 4). then subdivide to get more detail (5) and finally subdivide and smooth to finalize (6). notice also, that i did not intend to model exactely what i had drawn, but only used the concept to keep my idea lively…
the body was build the same way (sorry, i cannot show you the zsheres, as i forgot to save them). notice here that i modeled the places where to put the arms, legs and hands.
the hands and legs are just adaptive skinned zsperes (density =3, ires=4, membrane=100), no modeling. they look rough this way, but the material hides that later.
the teeth started off as the torus, use the tool/deformation/sbend and tool/deformation/taper to bend into rough shape. to get the teeth to the right proportion, so that they later fit into the dragons mouth i did the following :
i created a new layer. then draw the finished dragon head so that it looks to the right, snapshooted it, use gyro move to pull to right, use gyro rotate to rotate, so that dragon looks to front, snapshot and again move rotate so that you see top. then go back to first layer, draw your started teeth, try to position them into the dragonhead looking to right, use tool deformation/size to fit in from this view, the move teeth with gyro to the head looking to front, position it there, use tool/deformation/size to fit in from this view and so on… once you did this, you can subdivide your basic teeth and model the teeth to your likings.
tongue was made as the the teeth. horns were torus, with coverage about 120, scale 0.01 in the initialize settings.
i had actually modeled the wings you see in the concept, but then in 3d i did not liked them, so they did not make it into the image…
now we are ready to bring all the pieces together. i first create a layer for each piece to keep things apart. so i can easily correct position of single pieces. once satisfied, i make sure mrgb and zadd are turn on in the draw palette and merge down the layers which contain, head, body, arms and legs (its always a good idea to save your work before doing merge, in case you had forgotten to get the right settings, since merge is not undoable). and also merge down into another layer eyes, horns teeth. leave tongue separate. (i do this, so that i can easily paint the materials on these later) now i go to the layer which contains all the body parts. use blur with only zadd aktivated and smudge tool to blend the seams where the arms, head and legs meet the body. then your dragon is ready to get material, and color…
enjoy creating your own dragons. you are welcome to post your results in this thread.
) works for me. i like the zsphere method better.