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.

While sculpting my dragon continuously, I also experimented with the fireball idea, thinking that I could create a NURBS sphere, assign a green texture to it that was mostly transparent, and assign fire to it shortly thereafter. I worked with the fire colors for a while and the radius of the flame particles and eventually was satisfied with the result. I further experimented with sculpting of the face and "eyebrows" and then "teeth" on the rim of the jaw.

I worked further on my dragon, adding textures and experimenting with various colors, maintaining the green and gray spectrum. I stuck to my NURBS primitives the whole time and used the sculpting tool throughout.

After scouring for ideas and compiling general ideas of how I wanted to sculpt my dragon, I went to school in August and started working with Maya 3D Animation. First I tried creating separate pieces for the various parts of the dragon with NURBS shapes. I used spheres for everything, utilizing the sculpting tool to shape the spheres into a head, neck, body, legs, wings, etc.

Upon thinking further, I realized that I needed some references when I was to sculpt my dragon. I decided that I wanted to combine several different animals to make the dragon I had thought of. For the basic skeleton overall I preferred a horse structure, but I didn't want the dragon to be resigned to cantering and walking, seeing as I wanted him to crouch, run, and breathe fire. So I considered a cheetah as the ribcage and hind leg model and reserved the neck and head for the horse. Concerning the wings, I decided to morph bird and bat wings, keeping the phlanges from the bat but making a simpler design with the overall structure, like a bird wing.

I obtained basic dragon feet pictures to give me ideas of how to sculpt the feet and hands. I had originally wanted to have opposable thumbs on the front feet, changing them into hands, but the pictures I found for the front feet had more fingers than I desired, so I took that into account when I started sculpting.

I started working on my dragon in the summer of 2009, around the beginning of June. I didn't start Maya Animation until the school year started in August, so I only worked on design concepts, such as claws, hands, thumbs, etc. I started a vague idea of what I wanted to do in terms of modeling, trying to draw various angles in anticipation of the sculpting I would have to do during the school year.