Baby Dragon

This dragon character started off as a VFX shot I'm also working on. I wanted a character I could put into a live-action shot I'd filmed, focusing on camera tracking, colour management and using a proper VFX workflow.

However, after I had finished the character and animation, I realised putting it into the scene made the subtle animation a bit hard to see properly, so I just turned it into a render in itself.

I started out with the blockout of the body itself, then built out the structure from there to create the shape I wanted. I purposely kept it as low poly as possible so it could be easily subdivided later on. I didn't want to make a typical dragon so I included some elements from other animals like deer antlers and lamb ears.

Texturing was done in Substance Painter and essentially consisted of building up layers to mimic skin. I added a layer of slightly glossy spots to the skin to give a nice texture in the light.

I used the Rigify add-on with the cat metarig to create a control rig. The animation itself was a lot of trial and error, but I'm super happy with the result, and I would say it's probably the best animation of a character I've done.

I focused on moving the body to its main points throughout the animation. I was also inspired by cat movement, as I have two cats, so I kind of copied what I see them doing whilst sleeping, like the head shake. The breathing was just a shape key driven by a cycle modifier.

I wanted the soft parts like the ears and wings to have some secondary animation, so my idea was to simulate them on top of the animation itself. For this, I used Houdini.

I noticed that some parts of the animation were slightly clipping below the floor too, so I decided to fix this using a system that selects geometry under the floor and smoothly flattens it. It also slightly expands the feet as they get close to the floor, to make it seem like they are spreading out.

The simulation itself meant I needed to simplify the ear and wing meshes for simulation. I used a remesh and then a point deform to make them match the original animation.

Then, in a Vellum sim, I used a Match Shape constraint, which tries to keep the original shape as much as it's told to. I made the ears slightly less strict than the wings.

After that, I used a point deform to retarget the simplified simulation to the actual geometry. I also had to create a small system to properly reattach the wings and ears, as the simulation moved the attachment points slightly. I could probably have fixed this earlier on, but it worked out.