Although the simplest of my spirit characters, It took more time than others to prepare for this modelling process. I had to expand on my existing designs by creating a new, more detailed sheet focusing solely on this dragon spirit character. First however, I compiled an influence map of existing snakes:
Taking inspiration from traditional east Asian dragons, I found they typically follow the elongated anatomy of snakes.
I think when a character is extremely simple, Its easy to loose its personality when modelling. I therefore created a top, side and front character view sheet for reference.
This character is only seen for one shot in my animation during the opening sequence. However, it sets the tone for the entire narrative, being the first spirit seen, therefore the first suggestion of fantasy.
I modelled my character alongside stand-ins for scale reference.
I used my orthographs to create a basic yet accurate shape, then developed its silhouette by enlarging the head and belly. These adaptions give the character more shape variety, and interest when viewed from a distance.
I created a simple snake animation using a wave deformer. I attached a white incandescent material to match the appearance of my character in design work.
Above shows the position of the wave deformer against my dragon model. With an amplitude of 0.13 and wavelength of 0.27, I keyed at frames 1 and 3600 with an offset of 0 to 8 keyed at both ends.
I duplicated my deformed model to create a static wavy position, imported some proxy trees, and applied what I remembered from previous lighting workshops to create the above render. I'm liking how this looks, but scale is warped by the dragons glowing material (the dragon is very far from the camera). I hope to rectify this with some bird models, which will help convey the size of the dragon.
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