First I studied my chosen animal inspirations from real life and documentaries before creating a series of silhouettes. Then I questioned other readers of the novel to find out which one came closest to their imaginations, which resulted in the final one.
The entire modelling process was done inside Blender 2.8 and ZBrush. Bless Blender's new Grease Pencil Tool!
While alphas helped in making the scales arbitrary and believable, every scale still had to be refined by hand.
the UVs, rigging, and posing were also done in Blender 2.8 (the topology, UVs and seams are just shown in Maya because Maya's interface presents them better)
final images rendered in Maya
T-pose gif: Skeleton, Musculature and Final Form.
Draccus Turntable 01: T-Pose + Skeleton + Musculature
Draccus Turntable 02: Anger + Walking Pose
Draccus Turntable 03: Rolling around (theoretically rolling out a campfire...) + Bringing down a tree for later consumption (with and without tree). The tree is a free asset I downloaded :)
Render inside of Blender (but it refused to export the rendered frames because Blender 2.8 isn't/wasn't stable yet and the displacement map didn't work. I'm including these renders because the textures looked better in Cycles :) (this is just normal maps)
Showing off the dirt, worn spots and rusty areas as well as old wounds.
This is the result of my Bachelor Thesis, which was about believable creature design for a hypothetical live-action adaption of Rothfuss' fantasy novel "The Name of the Wind", creating the "draccus".
This meant that I moved beyond a concept piece, creating a functional, textured 3D model that can be rigged and animated. To make sure that the result would be the most realistic and believable, I studied my animal inspirations (the Komodo dragon, green and marine iguana, Chinese waterdragon and alligator) before creating a series of silhouettes. Then I asked a bunch of people who'd read the book for their opinions, before designing the final silhouette based on their responses, and created the skeleton and musculature before the final form, while using the silhouette as reference to stay true to my original intent.
The draccus is the origin of that world's dragon mythos, being a black 6ft tall lizard that can breathe fire, eats trees and has iron scales. I hope you enjoy my results!
