Dragon-Fly

Many years ago I had the idea to combine a dragonfly with a dragon, this is the forth version of this idea I have worked on

• the first attempt I abandoned as I couldn’t get something I was happy with at that point

• The second version I was happy with, and later had the opportunity to get feed back on it

• the third version was a result of that feedback & and general improvement in my blender ability, this third version also added an attempt at a more realistic branch for the dragonfly to land on

This tree branch, is based on some branches I walk past on my way to the shops and/or work and looked interesting (one of the many ref images in the gallery below). The branch is actually two object, the inner branch and out bark. the inner branch was formed with edges and the skin modifier, a copy was then made of this, scaled up and given a thickness to create the outer bark, both objects where then tweaked with normal mesh modelling, then sculpted on, then re-meshed (also had to decimate the outer bark as was a bit of a dense mesh by that point). Material wise the inner branch is texture painted using colours sampled from the ref images (wood is a lot more purple than I thought), the outer bark uses a modified version of the rusted iron node setup I created some time ago, with the colours also changed with sample colours from the ref images).

For this forth version I moved away from mesh modelling I instead sculpted with dynamic topology and then retopologised the sculpt, the retopologised version then had a high level of multires sculpt applied to it in order to create a more realistic skin and exoskeleton appearance.