Series: Creating a Stylized Dragon – Part 5

by David Ward
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Modeling, Texturing and UV Unwrapping, Tutorials

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 fifth part, I add seams to the model and unwrap the UVs, followed by a high-rez sculpt to give some subtle scales here and there. I then create a tangent normal map to apply to the low-rez version, and also bake the Ambient Occlusion.

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Discussion

38 Responses to “Series: Creating a Stylized Dragon – Part 5”
  1. Posts: 5
    Drawain says:

    How did you change the “view” in 16:07 (part 5.2) from camera into … ? I couldn’t understand it. I’m sorry. I am good at English, though I am not perfect. ^^’
    And sorry for my questions… I can’t guarantee they will stop in the future because I’m sure there will be more that I’ll don’t understand. But I am still trying to experiment around till I got an answer on my own before I ask.

  2. Posts: 1
    kilim says:

    hi, great tutorial, i have problem though. Everytime i bake ambient occlusion blender crashes somewhere in the middle of the process. Do you have any suggestions?

  3. Posts: 12
    Aaron Smithey says:

    I am having an issue where some seams will not clear. The only way to get them to clear is to delete the segement and recreate it. Is this a bug?

  4. Posts: 4
    Sherminator says:

    David, you caused me to delete all the games I had on my pc and concentrate on blender. Thanks for helping me do that

  5. Posts: 4
    Sherminator says:

    David, your tutorial caused me to delete all the games I had on my pc and concentrate on blender. Thanks for helping me do that

  6. Posts: 230
    verticies says:

    Well, I made it as far as I can with my little pc. Will try again when I have more power.

  7. Posts: 230
    verticies says:

    Back in buisness, found that shutting off the video saved me enough memory to bake the HR :)

  8. Posts: 5
    grumpyestonian says:

    Hi, part two of the video appears to be missing. Is there any way someone can put it back up? Thanks! I’m enjoying the series so far. Modeling is the easy part for me, so I was just getting to the part I can really learn from!

      • Posts: 5
        grumpyestonian says:

        Sweet! That was quick! Thank you so much!

  9. Posts: 11
    Chris Thom says:

    Why was it when you used the sculpt tool on the tail fins (vid 2 4:55) it went through to the other side?

  10. Posts: 2
    Teresa Giegler says:

    An easy way to select a run of edges to mark seams: In vertex select, select the start and end points; under the selection menu click “vertex path”. It will select the shortest run between the two points. You can then tweak the selection before you mark the seam.

  11. Posts: 1
    Jack Hutton says:

    I have been unable to bake the dragon’s skin in part 5.2. I have UV mapped the test grid to both models, and selected the test grid in the UV editor panel and selected the models low then high, just as in the tutorial. I then pressed bake, simply to have the error notification appear. I also tried to apply the test grid as a texture attached to a material on both models, and tried to bake again, without success. Could someone please try to suggest why I might still be unable to bake the texture. I would greatly appreciate a response, as I desperately want to complete this tutorial.

  12. Posts: 16
    Robert Schubert says:

    I can’t get the baking the multi-res to the low res dragon to work. I carefully followed Johnathan Williamson’s tutorial for normal map baking. I also read through the posts here. One thing I noticed is that when I use the multires on my second dragon, it increases my file size from about 2,000 mb to 55 mb. This prevented me from uploading my blend file to Blender Artists Community to get some help. I did an experiment. I took the default cube, made a duplicate on another layer, unwrapped the first cube and added a multires to the second cube. When I went to bake, it worked. I was also able to bake the ambient occlusion on the dragon without any problems. Hopefully, in part six I’ll get some better idea of what I’m doing wrong to bake the multires on the low res dragon.

    • Posts: 452
      Alex Telford says:

      in the bake settings choose bake from multi-resolution to bake directly from the multi res

      enter edit mode, select all and add an image in the uv image editor so it becomes assigned to those uv’s

      now bake

      Hope that helps :)
      -Alex

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