Dragon
For all your cooking needs
Back in the day I made a bunch of slip cast dragons using a mould made from a modified plastic dinosaur and since then have wanted to create a ‘cute’ dragon from scratch.
This dragon being Welsh is making himself some dragon baked rarebit (the traditional way such things are cooked) and in the below gallery are some of the various other dragons made from this initial mesh.
After creating the basic body, this was then rigged with an armature so that I could easily re-pose the mesh for the different dragon types.
The flame mesh was vertex painted to highlight parts of the flame, this map was then fed into an attribute node which controlled two emission nodes (colours controlled by two colour ramps). this setup was then combined through an Add node so as to increase the overall brightness of the flame. I had initially created this with a node setup for a more realistic flame using the ‘flame’ and ‘density’ options of the attribute node but this more realistic looking flame clashed with the more cartoonish dragon.
The skin was made by mixing values in a colour ramp with a noise texture node and then displacing this with another noise texture node fed into a bump node (instead of using the displacement on the material output node).
The clipart version of the dragons in the gallery below use the shader setup from this CG Cookie tutorial.
