Week 6- Continuing with my image of April

During this weeks tutorials I continued with my image of St George and the Dragon. To begin with I continued with the arms which I started last week. I was not happy with the appearance at the end of last week and so I made some slight alterations to the shapes I used. I changed the bottom part of the arms from a cylinder to a cone with the dimensions of 4.11 for the top radius, 2.62 for the bottom radius and 16.482 for the height. I used a sphere for the elbow joint and another sphere for the hand which I flattened by scaling.

When I was pleased with the appearance of the arm I cloned each of the sections and re-arranged them on the other arm. Afterwards I added claws to the hand as the ones I added to the feet made the creature appear to be more ferocious. To do this I cloned the cones which I created for the claws of the foot and placed them at sensible places around the sphere.

Next I decided to create the wings of the dragon. For this I chose to use the spline technique. I started with the line tool to draw the shape I wanted, but I did struggle to get the shape and so I needed a few attempts at this and also had to edit some of the vertex’s to perfect the shape.

Once I had the shape I wanted I made it into an editable poly and extruded the shape before capping the back. I then moved and rotated the wing so it was in line with the body sector before I resized it slightly to try to make it proportional to the rest of the dragon. I then cloned the wing and aligned it parallel to the first.

The next step was to add the bones to the wing. For each of these I used a cone. When I had the length I wanted I applied the bend modifier so the cones covered the edge of the wings and cloned each before placing on the other wing. I made the length of the cones longer than the edge of the wing as I felt it would look most effective this way.

I felt the next step was to move onto the figure of St George. To do this I started with the body and for this I used a box. I wanted the figure of George to be a lot smaller than the dragon and so used the dimensions of 5.728 by 8.996 by 11.67. Next I worked on the legs and so used a cylinder and a cone. I chose to use a cone for the top part of the leg as I felt the slightly sloping shape would be quite realistic. The lengths of these were 8.293, the top radius was 2.232 and the bottom radius was 1.832. To create the bottom part of the leg I used a cylinder with the same radius as the bottom of the cone as I felt the consistency would look best. When I felt that the proportions and positioning were suitable I cloned the sections and placed them to the side.

There was a gap between the knees which made it obvious that I pieced the sections together, so to make the joint smooth I added a sphere between the two sections.

The next thing I did was extrude the box to create the shoulders. I did this as I felt it would look best if the body armour continued onto the arms. To do this I separated the height of the body into four sections so that I could increase the width of the top only. I was quite pleased with how this turned out and felt it would be quite useful.

To create the arms I used two methods. For one I used a cone which was 10.462 long for the whole length of the arm and a sphere of the same radius as the top of the cone for the join to the body. For the other arm I used a cone, cylinder and sphere so I could create a bend at the elbow. The upper part of the arm was created using a cone with the top radius of 1.9, the bottom radius of 1.464 and the height of 5.664. On the bottom part of the arm I used a cylinder with the radius the same as the bottom of the top part of the arm and the length of 5.036. I used a sphere to join these two parts as this worked well on the joints of the dragon and St George. Once again I used the sphere to create the shoulder joint and to do this I cloned the one used on the other side.

Afterwards I used capsules to create the feet. I used the scale tool to flatten the shape slightly and applied a slight bend to the foot as this would work best with the angles of the legs.

The next part of George I decided to create was his helmet. I felt that I would get the most suitable shape for this by editing a sphere. I therefore started with a sphere and flattened the bottom using the hemisphere tool. After this I scaled the dimensions of the sphere to squash the shape slightly.

To make the shape look more like a helmet I decided to add an eye shield to the front of the sphere. I felt that drawing my own shape would be the best process to use so that I would get the exact shape I wanted. For this I used the spline technique. I started by using the line tool and drew out half of the visor. From my starting shape I edited the vertex’s slightly to try to get the curving edge I wanted.

Afterwards I made it into an editable poly and extruded it slightly. Once I was happy with the thickness of the shape I capped the edge, put it in place and cloned it to get two identical shapes. I had quite a bit of trouble scaling the shapes and lining them up with the sphere of the helmet and each other. At this point I found that the width of the shape I had drawn was too short and when scaled down it did not look right and so I used a rectangle and placed it in between the two. After some time I managed to align the three sections of the visor correctly and am reasonably pleased with its appearance.

Next I created the sword. I did this in two stages, firstly the blade and then the handle. For the blade I used a box and pyramid. I chose these shapes as they would give a ridged appearance and work well when I apply lighting. I kept the width and depth of the box and pyramid the same and made the height of the box quite long. I chose to make the pyramid very high as I felt it would look more effective than if it was shorter. I used two cylinders to create the handle and placed them in a “T” shape as this is how I imagine the handle to be. I had slight difficulty in aligning the different parts as I had to rotate them to the exact angle, but eventually I was pleased with the structure.

I then created the shield for St George. To do this I used the spline technique to get the shape I required. For this I started with the line tool to draw the basic shape and edited the vertex’s to make it symmetrical.

I then converted it to an editable poly and extruded it slightly to give it a third dimension. When I put it in place the shield was too large in comparison to St George and so I scaled it until I was happy with the proportions.

Lastly I worked on the spikes for the spine. I used a prism to create the shape. I wanted to make sure that the shape was an isosceles triangle and so I edited the dimensions to 41.4 and 26.249.

I placed this at the base of the tail and scaled it to the right size. Afterwards I rotated it so that spike was perpendicular to the tail. When I was happy with the position of it I cloned the shape and continued to arrange then up the tail and onto the body.

I am pleased with how my image has developed during the week even though I struggled to get some parts how I wanted them to be. I will continue with this image by completing the spikes on the dragon’s spine, creating the face and then adding materials and lighting.