Adventures across the 3rd dimension

Banj wrote:

 I find the wing membrane to be the trickiest part of 3D Dragons

Indeed.
And when rigging how do you get them to fold correctly without the membrane just stretching?
If I don't have any bright ideas the whole idea may just abort itself at this point.

Perhaps some trial-and-error experiments may help over the next few days.

Valence wrote:

And when rigging how...

OK, I've turned the wings into a higher poly mesh (using the sculpting soften tool with Dyntopo rather than the voxel remesh that didn't work well at all) and I've now Booleaned (that's not a real word. ) them together with the dragon body so that they don't come apart when you try to rig them.
I'm now glad I tried that rigging experiment first. I would be very annoyed if I discovered that problem right at the end
He still doesn't have teefies yet but I think the next thing to do is vertex painting to make it look ...erm... dragony? Lifelike? Or maybe just... better?
At the moment, despite all the effort, it doesn't look any different from the last wip so there's no point in posting another one.

Still vertex painting.... (yawn)

 

Slowly working my way down to the tail. Slowly.
And he does have teefies now even if you can't see them here.

Even though I increased the poly count of the wings there still doesn't seem to be enough vertices for this kind of texturing so I may need to add something else there to make it look less bland. Surely not a UV though.

Banj wrote:

Use UVs 

No.

Still no UVs.
But look! Look!
I watched this tutorial and had a go at recreating it....


...and the results were surprisingly convincing for a procedural texture.
 

I now wish I hadn't wasted so much time trying to sculpt and vertex paint the details cos this is much better.
In fact I may now need to smooth out and repaint all that unnecessary stuff to take advantage of this.