Dragon Head WIP1 (Patreon)

Last night and today I've worked on the dragon's head! I think I got pretty close to the energy of the sketch.

I kind of originally imagined a like, red/orange firey dragon. But as I was doing some vertex painting, I thought maybe he's a dark element dragon or something. Here's the viewport:

The hair was created using nurbs curves and custom shapes. In order to have it deform nicely, I created a hair cage- it deforms the hair using the mesh deform modifier. This is a pretty common approach for deforming something complex without having to use a zillion bones! There's some secondary animation on the hair using the wonderful bone dynamics add on.

I kind of want to lean a bit heavier into some satanic imagery, like in the sketch I thought he'd be cool if he had some pentagrams on his horns, maybe they're like, glowy-red.

I'm on the fence about it though, because I plan on doing the voice for him and I don't know how well I could do a smooth, demony dragon voice. Maybe I'll do some tests once I rig the face fully, but it's on to the body next! He will be predictably dragon shaped, but with, of course, a large, bulbous dragon dump truck chunkus rumpus~

So that'll be fun!!