Almightygir

hey man, managed to remember :P now, not wanting to hijack your thread or anything, spoiler tags are going to hide everything!

please send me a message reminding me to give you some pointers on how to use zbrush for larger creatures like this in the morning... sleepy time now! =]

@niagra127 - Hey, i use zbrush for almost everything, in fact there are a lot of models i make which start off as zspheres! the guys who made sculptris were recently bought by pixologic as well, so much of the sculptris technology (on the fly tesselation etc.) has been integrated into zbrush, the new dynamesh system is very similar. most likely your biggest hurdle will be the interface, but other than that if you can sculpt in one package you can sculpt in another! @BolasNicol - oh dude i'm sorry, i didn't mean to offend, and i took none either. i was just giving my reasons =] One thing i'm looking into is how flexible skyrims shader network is. i get the feeling it won't be able to do what i want to do, but the end goal is to have the dragon rideable, with a saddle and everything, and for the player to be able to choose the colour dragon they want from an RGB slider. @jimhsu - i have plenty of friends both amature and professional who animate, this won't be a problem.

well thankfully the colour of the scales can be very easily controlled because they're all masked, all i've done is chosen the rgb value for that layer and the mask does the rest, see? http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/screengrabs/dragon19.png

@BolasNicol - from my point of view, there are no restrictions in art or expression. i'd rather leave the lore of skyrim to bethesda, and make things that i want to make. i'm not forcing anyone to download it, and if people honestly feel that a true dragon is out of place in skyrim alongside it's lesser wyrms is going to break their gameplay experience, then i guess there's some pretty shallow people out there. i mean, why remake something that's already in the game, where's the point or the fun in that? try to bear in mind that this is a work in progress, so there will be sections which look undetailed and probably even unstarted by comparrison to others. but i hear you on the teeth, i am also looking into the ability to have some form of drool texture just to help break up the empty space that an open mouth creates. @Zinnorokkrah - Awe and Fear often go hand in hand, i think anyway. you can't truly worship something you don't fear, right? my draconic inspiration comes from sooo many places. i guess my childhood love of dinosaurs and "giant lizards" in general started it off. but i fell in love with the idea of dragons from a young age... so my ideas are usually a jumbled mess stemming from books, games, and film. i loved the inheritance books, i also enjoyed the dragonlance books (song of autumn twilight through to summer flame), i have the draconomicon (dungeons and dragons book), and yes i've fallen in love with a song of ice and fire! @AnonDraco - The scales were sculpted in zbrush, i created a couple of alpha masks based around crocodile and dinosaur scale patterns, and used those as the basis for this dragons scales. wheeeeew... so i finally decided on a colour scheme that i like! going for deep red + tiger/zebra style stripes to break up the colour a little bit. still need to do almost all of the scales lol. also still need to do spec + gloss maps, see if i can differentiate between scales and skin a bit. i'm looking at the scale of the forearms, probably going to make them longer so when it's standing it'll have a more cat-like posture. i want this thing to be considdered THE apex predator, as deadly on land and water as in the air. http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/screengrabs/dragon17.png http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/screengrabs/dragon18.png

working on it...

i hated the saphira in the movie... in fact i just hated the movie, such a shame, with the cast they had it should have been amazing.

no feedback, suggestions, criticism at all? wow...

i know this forum isn't for requests... but i'd like to see: war break out in skyrim, whether between individual towns, or between the empire and the nords, or whatever. to have an active, ongoing battle raging across all of skyrim would be so atmospheric.

as i said, that would effectively double the polygon count for the entire model, as every single face would then be rendered twice regardless of any situation. it's far more efficient to just duplicate and invert the normals for the faces you need.

I was under the impression that method was only used when making fur/hair, since it doesnt give the impression of "thickness" otherwise... though I still dont know what kind of meshes they are making. well, the question was how to make faces double sided, not how to make a mesh appear thicker.

duplicate the faces you want to be backsided, and then right click - invert(flip) normals. making an entire texture double sided is a very inefficient way to do it, essentially it doubles the polycount of your model. it's better to just duplicated the faces and flip the normals where required.

started a rough texture: http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/screengrabs/dragon16.png

speaking from a dungeons and dragons standpoint, dragons are catagorised into two groups: Chromatic dragons - generally evil, come in the following verieties from largest to smallest, most to least powerful: Red - Fire based abilities, fully grown is gargantuan, makes it's den in volcanic areas, in large caves. Black - poisonous gas, fully grown is around 80% the size of red dragon, lives in swamp/marshland, tunnels underwater to make its den. Green - weak fire based breath, has mind control/fear abilities, fully grown is around 65% the size of red dragon, lives in forests. Blue - lightning based abilities, around the same size as green dragons, lives in deserts/arid regions, is a bit of a trickster. White - frost based abilities, around 50% the size of red dragons, lives on snowy peaks or icy regions. Metallic dragons - generally good, they are relative in size/power to their chromatic counterparts, so in order from largest/most powerful to smallest/weakest: Gold - fire abilities Silver - frost abilities Copper - acid breath Bronze - lightning abilities Brass - weak fire abilities

http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/screengrabs/dragon14.png http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/screengrabs/dragon15.png low poly model with normalmaps, still need to do some of his spines.

http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/screengrabs/dragon13.png almost done with the retopo/lowpoly. currently sitting at 12k tri's but i still have some more to do. so it's well under budget at the moment.

resculpted the head a bit, hope this is more to peoples liking... because i like it this more way :P http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/screengrabs/dragon12.png

i'm working on a flyable dragon, click my sig for details.

like i said, i'll take a look, but i'm pretty busy.

haha, well i read each book within 24 hours of getting them (my girlfriend didn't see me the whole time lol). they're certainly entertaining. i wish he'd write a book about angela though.

haha we'll see. i had thought about making thorn and murtagh at some point... but i'm a little busy :( i also don't know that i could capture saphira in a way that all readers of the book would appreciate.

Hi there, i'm Almighty gir, i mostly post on the polycount forum, but figured something more central to skyrim can't hurt! here's what i'm working on: http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/screengrabs/dragon7.png http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/screengrabs/dragon8.png http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/screengrabs/dragon9.png things i'm still working on/need to be started: fingers toes elbow spikes back plates saddle i intend to make this rideable, and if possible have a quest attached to it (ie: you can't obtain/ride it without completing the quest). however intentions aren't everything, i don't even know how much of what i want is possible! also, please bear in mind that the model is currently in the high poly/zbrush stage, once i'm happy with it i will be making it game ready in 3ds max. criticism and comments gratefully recieved. thank you :)