Kobold TOPPING animation wip (Patreon)

Here's the first chunk of the animation- the rest of it is still not quite ready to show yet, but I thought this sequence looks pretty good so far!

I also did some investigating on how to approach building the cave environment the dragon lives in. I tried a few different methods, one using remeshing a simple, square version of the cave then using subdivisions and displacement to shape it. It didn't offer a lot of control though since I couldn't figure out how to generate vertex group data AFTER remeshing... so there was not way to control noise strength in areas where you would want it to be flat or smoother.

I found some interesting sculpting brushes for making rocks:

https://blendswap.com/blend/20195

And saw someone making rocks using these brushes... so I figured maybe sculpting the cave is the way to go? It's terribly great right now, since this is more of a throw away test, just to give the idea of a cave for now. Here it is with some textures:

Since it's a sculpted mesh, relying on UVs (for now, anyway) isn't a good idea. So I used object mapping for the texture coordinates (or like "global" as it used to be known in the old Blender Internal renderer days if I remember correctly).

There's three image textures, using various noises to mix between rock and green moss-like stuff. The dirt on the bottom is based on the position of another empty in the world. Nothing too fancy, I think this is a common way of texturing an object that would be impractical to make a UV map for.

It looks good enough in the background for now, of course later on I'll be expanding on it and adding more detail and such.

This of course, is just for the post-credits scene that shows the dragon viewing the vide of the kobold...~