In this multi-part series, I’ll be covering how to box-model a stylized dragon, making heavy use of the various sculpt tools. The texturing will cover creating tangent normal maps and using the “toon shader” to get a nice cel-shaded look. I’ll also go into some intermediate rigging with some nice animations; from walking to pouncing to flying. and finally we’ll look into setting up a good composition with props and lighting.
In this part 6, I go over a few more tricks on baking, and go ahead and add a “jaw open” shapekey so we can see inside the mouth. Then we jump into Photoshop to do some cleanup on the texture.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
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24 Comments
You are my favorite
I really like the color choice, very scary. =)
You might want to go back to the other articles and link them as you add more. It would be more helpful to have links to go to the next tutorial as opposed to links leading backwards, which you have right now.
You are absolutely right… will get on that right now.
yes! i’ve been waiting for this.
What you missed at the end with the normal maps was the image assigned to it had changed to the skin texture image.
I’m excited to see the rigging. Rigging is something that has always been my weakest link.
Great tut. I have now tested out the Shape Keys on a cube, and got it to work.
great! just in time for the weekend.. thanks, dave!
and how many total parts to this were you thinking of making?
hi Wes, i believe that the no image baking error is from not saving the image to the disk.
You should change the blending mode in Photoshop (or GIMP for FLOSS among us) to “Color” for the parts of the image that you selected with the pen tool (Teeth, claws, etc.). This will keep the ambient occlusion data (luminance) while still changing the color. Your processor worked hard to give you that information don’t let Photoshop hide it!
the ambient occlusion data made things too dark. He brightened it up while changing the colour.
So I guess, it was intentional to do what he did.
Although of course, the teeth, horns and claws didn’t have any data left at all
Hey! Grate tut… fast tip: if you have a file which name ends with a number, you can press “save as”, then “+”, and Blender automatically detects the number and adds +1 (if it doesn’t have a number, Blender will add one). Fast and easy!
Cheers!
Oh! Sorry, Grate = Great!!!
Maybe you could use “Classical Halfway” and both Distances to Auto to get rid of the shadow issues…
AFAIK, there is no disadvantage of Classical Halfway over Classical. However, it gets rid of certain Buffer Shadow issues
Oh, and great tutorial
Very cool stuff Dave. Wish I had more time to play around creating my own Dragon.
ALT-B to show only the part you want, then ALT-B to restore.
This is the best 3D tutorial ever!! Thanks a lot.
I was learning a different 3D software, one of those “intuitive ones”.
At the beginning I thought Blender to be impossible, too cryptic interface….
but! after this tutorial I simply love Blender, I’ll never look back again.
Thanks David for the inspiration
Here is what I got so far
http://picasaweb.google.com.au/couturier.arnaud/Art2010#5501883735207205906
Nice work Piiichan
I wonder what ever happened to part 7.
It is on its way
i saw part seven and i think you should add what you learned in the game engine and make a walk cycle for the dragon. just a simple walk cycle, but make one and set him up so you can walk him around