CGAN Feb 24 - The Dragon - WIPs

*keeps fiddling with wing positions*

It's hard to do a flying pose that doesn't look weirdly static.

Valence wrote:

*keeps fiddling with wing positions*

It's hard to do a flying pose that doesn't look weirdly static.

You could key frame two different positions and render one frame with motion blur 

Sadly the actual rendering is still causing crashing problems. The ground displacement modifier makes the whole scene over six million polygons and my PC doesn't seem to like that. So I will be sticking with just a screengrab of the viewport which still manages to work after the displacement, albeit very slowly.
I think I may be able to fake a bit of motion blur with some selective chromatic aberration from the dispersion post-processing thing but getting the actual pose right will also help. The correct twisting of the neck seems to be the key part of the anatomy.

*fiddles with the bones a bit more*

Some feedback on your final, Val:

It took me a while to realise the blurry dark shape next to the horse in the background was smoke from a small fire - even if I saw the fire. The shape is a wee bit horselike (maybe in the way you see shapes in clouds, but still enough to confuse my brain) so I was wondering why there was a blurry horse there when the other horseys weren't blurry. And I'm thinking since the dragon is moving in the direction he's firing, maybe the small fire and smoke would look better replaced with a small line of fire where the initial blast hit - as if that bit has mostly burnt out already (am I making sense? I dunno, but anyway, that was a thought I had). Easiest fix might just be to change the smoke shape slightly in a painting program...

(I tried to find a pic with an example of what I'm thinking but I can't, sorry...)

Thank you.
I'm always a bit reluctant to paint over these too much cos my messy painting style is so different from the sharp edges and soft gradients of 3D work and it usually sticks out like an obvious thing.
But that should be fixable in the time.

Interestingly (or not ) the little fire is just a flat plane. I had intended to have another fire simulation in the background but due to my creaking, complaining PC it refused to run past frame 10. (Even though nothing else is moving the simulations are animated and the the fire breath in the image is about frame 23) So I had to animate the little fire separately in a different file and rendered one frame to a transparent PNG and imported that and added a little point light at the base for the glow.
So I should be able to just change the frame to get a different smoke shape.