- Maya
- Arnold Renderer
Dragon Renders
For my advanced 3D animation class, I was tasked with modeling any object of my choice and rigging it. Having already done some character modeling and rigging, I decided to challenge myself and model something out of my comfort zone, a dragon. I also wanted to push my creativity by creating the dragon myself, limiting the amount of references I looked at and creating something that was 100% my own design. After I finished the model and the rig, I decided I wanted to put it in its own scene.
When thinking about what to pair the dragon with, I had thought about various infrastructures like a castle, medieval buildings, and a Japanese temple. I chose to model a Japanese temple, because I thought that fit the dragon best. When I researched temples in Japan, they were all surrounded with lots of greenery, which is why I filled the empty space with trees and shrubs. When it came to adding the materials to the dragon, I chose a purple because I wanted it to stand out against all the green in the scene.
Because I had rigged the dragon, I was able to pose it. I placed the dragon on the very top of the temple to symbolize its power, as if it was looking over its own territory. When posing the dragon, the pose had to be dynamic. I imagined how the dragon would be moving if it was on the top of the temple, watching over the ground underneath it, and I pictured its tail slowly moving back and forth, and its head looking into the distance, bobbing up and down as it breathed. I wanted to capture this motion in the images I composed. In three of the four rendered images, its head and tail are turned in opposite directions to create balance. When placing my cameras, I used the rule of thirds to compose my images, placing the focal points of my scene at the intersecting lines.
- Maya
- Arnold Renderer
- Adobe Premier Pro
Dragon Animation And Rig
For my advanced 3D animation class, I was tasked with modeling any object of my choice and rigging it. Having already done some character modeling and rigging, I decided to challenge myself and model something out of my comfort zone, a dragon. After I finished the model and the rig, I decided to model a scene to pair with it so that I could use the dragon in an animation.
When thinking about what to pair the dragon with, I chose to model a Japanese temple, because I thought that fit the dragon best. When I researched temples in Japan, they were all surrounded with lots of greenery, which is why I filled the empty space with trees and shrubs. When it came to adding the materials to the dragon, I chose a purple because I wanted it to stand out against all the green in the scene.
I placed the dragon on top of the temple to symbolize its power. I tried to make the dragon’s movements feel as normal and organic as possible. This was a challenge because animating a dragon is much different than animating a human, given that a dragon does not exist in the real world. The dragon starts with its back turned to the camera. I wanted to create a feeling of mystery by not revealing its face right away. By the end of the clip, the dragon has turned its head and is looking straight at the camera, invoking a sense of fear into the viewer.