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 seventh Blender 2.5 Video Tutorial, I show you some tweaks I did to the texture map, and show you how it looks with the Toon shader applied (along with some SSS – SubSurface Scattering), then I jump in and build the rig.
Thanks to TMT and veeQue for their quick tips (sorry I forgot your names in the video 
).
Hooray! Can’t wait to watch this.
once i begin to feel a small amount more comfortable with blender, i think i shall try this whole series. a great tut!
good tut. I was kinda sad that the blink didn’t work out. I’m still trying to fully understand armatures so this was super helpful. just wondering, would an IK chain work for the neck and tail?
Hello,
may I answer?!
It’d certainly work, but it doesn’t make much sense to use IK in that area. That’s because you normally animate a head via FK or constraints, as well as the tail. You could for example add a “copy rotation”-constraint to your tail-bone-chain and then you’d just animate the root of the tail and the rest follows nicely. I tried to animate a tail with a IK solver and it worked… …but in a very unusual way.
And animating the neck with an IK solver is not recommendable – try it, you’ll see.
Like always, great tutorial!!!
Greetings from germany!
it would, but you wouldn’t have good control of rotating the head left and right
ohhh ok. that makes sense.
Very nice tutorial, just two tips:
1- The armature and the mesh should have the origin point in the same place
2- If you want to center the 3d cursor in only one axis or put it in a exact place you should use the snap tool or change it position in the “n” panel…
Or the shortcut shift-C to snap the 3D cursor directly to the origin. Very handy!
Love the tutorial series btw, awesome job. Just got done with the game engine tutorials recently as well and loved them too. Glad “the cookie” got a hold of you, keep it up!
Instead of taking the time to “exactly” line the cursor up with the “blue” line, why not just hit (SHIFT-C) and snap the cursor to the origin, and then reselect the proper view port?
Good series by the way.
Very good. If you can teach how to use the modifier Mesh deformer on the next tutorial or another tutorial in this series would be excellent.
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-250/spline-ik/
Really cool-looking way to go about the neck and tail — it was a little painful to watch you struggle through trying to make them work well. Forgive me if this wouldn’t work; I’ve never actually tried it.
I’m sure you’ve already seen this, yet it is still worth mentioning for anyone else who wants to see it.
http://durian.blender.org/production/wing-simulation-or-gaaaaaah/
I am loving this tutorial series.
Great as always David!
In case you need it for another chapter, you missed copying the eyebrow and ear bones for mirroring to the right.
As always, thanks for sharing your great knowledge!
yes, i realized that after i finished the recording; the final .blend file (if you purchase the bundle) has them in there correctly, tho. good eye
Very good tutorial! Just an FYI you didn’t get the ear or the eyebrow when you mirrored them over. Cant wait to see the next one.
Yes snakes blink, infact they have 4 sets of eye lids just like cats, a interior set that closes and makes a vertical line (opposite of a human eye lid) and then an exterior that closes and makes a horizontal line (like a human eye)
That texture update you did is great! It really looks good now
– the eye looked odd to me though. Was it only the view you gave or does it not have any pupil?
To center up perfectly, why don’t you just recenter the cursor in the viewport and then go to sideview?
That way you get a perfect lineup and probably end up being faster for not needing to zoom in and out…
Besides that, pretty nice tutorial
Alternatively you could check out the cursor coordinates in the pannel on the right: Just go into the x-coordinate (first one) and type in 0. -> Perfect allignment
Btw, you forgot to copy the eyebrow and ear at the end.
Ok just read the comments and lol, I guess mine where quite unneccessary
Most was mentioned before already.
I only didn’t mention the part about blinking snakes because I saw Connor’s comment where it’s described pretty correctly
I think in fact all reptiles have that kind of double eyelid. Not sure though… Crocodiles definitely have aswell.
Whenever I go to pose the the bones, they won’t rotate. I’m wondering if there is some kind of setting that is preventing this?
some of them or all? You can constrain the degrees of freedom for each bone…
Yeah, or you could just change the X position of the center in the panel directly to the right of your viewport to “0″; for instance, at 3:14, the x position is at 0.0002.
My dragon has been brought up to date with D.Ward’s Part 7 and we are just sitting here, grounded, and eagerly waiting for Part 8! A great series overall and I’ve learned a number of new things, both from the videos and the comments, so thanks to everybody!
Best video of someone boning a Dragon I have ever seen.
Hello Dave! You made a great tutorial! But i have some trouble with Right side bones behaviour after mirroring. I’m using Blender 2.55 and after x-mirror the Left side bones and flipping names of Right side bones, selecting the Left side bones again and pressing CTRL+R nothing happens, bone axes of right side doesn’t change. X-mirror is on, i checked that. And In pose mode Copy\Paste flipped keys is working, BUT! when i animate the Right side, it behave strangely – on inbetween frames animated R-bones get strange rotation angles. L-bones are good.
So animation is complete crap. I am confused, why CTRL+R does nothing?
here is the video of my problem. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG8TaJpLiBI
Sorry, i’m not native english speaker.
Nice tutorial, but I need to learn how to rig a tail without B-bones, since my game engine does not support them.
Hello! Compliments for this tutorials! At the beginning of the video, you mention some Sub Surface Scattering, Toon Shader and Eyeball tutorials that you made in the past; unfortunately, I can’t find them… are they here on Blender Cookie? Can anyone provide me a link? Thanks
Ok, I found them by myself…
): http://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/07/07/tip-toon-shader/
Toon Shader (that’s not fair, it was under another nickname
SSS: http://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/10/13/update-projection-painting-in-2-5/
Eyeball:http://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/02/08/creating-an-eyeball/
quadruped?
i count 6 limbs.
did you forget about the wings?
Quadruped means “four footed.” -ped refers specifically to feet or legs, rather than limbs in general. This is why humans are not considered quadrupedal, even though we have 4 limbs ourselves.