Since my last post, I've participated in SKILLS USA District Competition in Beaumont. Syphon (the dragon) did a good job, and now he's going to state competition. So, with that in mind, I'm expanding the storyline to incorporate more of the storyboard I created at the beginning of this project. Everything's going pretty smoothly. The fireball has been created and animated. It looks really cool--more like a comet than an actual fireball, but that works even better, since the fireball goes really fast. In fact, I had to make a tail on the fireball because it went too fast for the camera to follow. The only hard part is figuring out how to make the "comet-tail" dissipate further. I'll work on that later.

What I'm actually doing right now is making trees for my exterior landscaping. At first I tried visors, but my file is already humongous and the visor trees just slow it down even more. After deleting the trees several times, since they slowed me down and also didn't cover the edge of my grass, I went into Alias Mudbox and sculpted a tree stump and a bush. These overloaded my computer when I imported them into Maya 2010, and after two days of attempting to incorporate them into my landscape and failing utterly, I resorted to my tactic from last year in constructing trees. I'm using cylinders with bark texture and bump maps for the trunks and basic cones for the "leaf" part of the tree. Since I want an evergreen forest, this actually works really nicely. I'm just trying to find the right texture for my leaves now.


But so far, I've had my dragon animated so that he flaps his wings, hisses, spits a fireball/comet, lashes his tail, squints, lifts his foot, cocks his head, moves his neck like a serpent, etc. I don't have him moving around yet, since I've only gotten to the part where the camera runs away, but I'm about to work on that after I finish my trees.

ALSO, I made a hand for my camera. I sculpted it in Mudbox, and put it in my storyline during the view of the gems and also when the dragon shifts positions in his sleep (as if scared/surprised). This, thankfully, didn't overload my program and cause it to shut down randomly. It just makes the preview really slow.

Just a couple of questions

Ok, so the interior of my cave is coming along really nicely, but the exterior lighting isn't really working out. I've created somewhat of a concealment for my cave entrance (rocks that make it not so square), but the lighting isn't working out. I made a large spot light for the "sunlight" that I want coming from behind the mountain (NURBS cone) that contains my cave, but instead of creating a shadow of the mountain, the light goes through the cone and messes up all the interior lighting I have for the dragon's lair. So, my question is, any suggestions for this?

My next problem is with modeling the exterior. I want to have trees, but the "pre-made" visor trees take too long to load and scale properly. I tried to think of a way to model a nice-looking tree (at this point, I don't care whether it's hardwood or not) and couldn't come up with a solid design. If you haven't already figured it out, I'm best at NURBS and am not used to polygon modeling. However, if you have any polygon or general tree tips I'm all ears. It's the learning experience I'm going for. New stuff isn't a bad idea. Thanks.

View of the front of the cave from behind the dragon's shoulder

Floor view across the dragon's toes of the skull, stalactites, and crystals

Aerial view of the cave

Texture demonstration and glowing eyes

I started putting lighting in my scene by placing a spotlight with a wide angle at the entrance to the cave, serving as the "sunlight" coming in. This showed off my texturing very nicely and then I decided to have my dragon's eyes glow to increase the fantasy idea of my project. The mysterious glow of the gems and the greenish reflection off my dragon's skin were very nicely demonstrated through the lighting and the crystals added to that effect. I'm considering adding the varying color and light reflection attitudes to other textures in the landscaping.

Once I had gotten my dragon textured, I started on the landscape of the cave he'd be starting the video in and the stalactite "maze" he would run through. I tried out a few bump maps for the limestone effect and finally settled on a relatively smooth one for a slightly sandy effect. In fact, that gave me the idea of creating a sandy floor in the cave. Since I also added crystals from Maya's visor brush to my cave and changed them green, the sand effect worked wondrously in the landscape. It also looked more realistic than my previous idea of limestone flooring.

Considering my dragon's imaginary traits, I made a treasure pile with gold and gems on one side of the center of the "maze" and a skull and two typical long bones on the other. The idea is that the camera will be startled by the bones, knock into the dragon, and wake it up, thus starting the plotline of the dragon chasing the camera through the maze and out into the forest.

In the end it took a while to get him all textured-up and to choose the right bump mapping, but I used Photoshop a lot and finished the job. He looked great after all my work and effort and I went through a few wing textures until I settled on the one I liked the most. I added a special luminance and reflective tendency to his "scales" that made them reflect the light as greenish. I also decided that he would be stony instead of scaly, appearing as a statue come to life.

After rigging my dragon and setting him up in general, and before I worked out the kinks in his movement, I decided I should work on his textures in order to see how he moved and whether or not it would look off with the textures I picked.

I worked with Adobe Photoshop to create the basic colors and scales (based off of images I got off the net) along with bump maps to create my tough scaly look I wanted for him.

After sculpting all of this, I realized that the way I had been creating my dragon might not allow for easy rigging and animation. So I started over in a new file, using a polygonal primitive cube to sculpt everything in a different way. I had not done this in the first place because I was more comfortable using NURBS, but the advantage of the polygonal primitive was that everything was melded together, not merely floating in space.

However, the results of my sculpting was not as satisfactory as I wanted, and when I tried to put joints into the legs I could not move only one leg at a time. So I switched back to my former NURBS setup after creating a new eye texture on Adobe Photoshop.