During this semester I started working on a 3-D dragon in Maya. In total I worked 120 hours on this dragon and I am not yet done. Now that I look back on my initial idea I might have been a bit in over my head. I ran into a lot of problems making the dragons head alone and even more for the rest of the dragon. It was very frustrating to keep running into problems after just solving one and that lead to me starting to loose interest in the dragon but I tried my best and this is how hard I got.
In the beginning the scope of this project was to animate the dragon. Now I am far from animating the dragon and around the middle of semester 1 I made my new goal to just finish modeling the dragon and that still didn't happen. Although I still got pretty far in the modeling process.
When I first thought to make a dragon my first idea was to make a tiger and then I thought how about a dragon instead. Since for some reason I wanted what I was animating to fly (The biggest mistake I made). I had my good friend Greta sketch out a basic dragon and I put it into Maya.
I then made the dragon using the sketch that I put into Maya and moving the vertexes to create separate body parts. There was one part of the dragon I could just trace the sketch and that was the wing. I had to extrude a cylinder and move it around in a certain way to make the main to part of my wing and I the extruded certain polygons on the extruded cylinder and made the fingers of the wing.
After the wings I started to work on the feet which I made from a cube and lots of extruding to make the claws. I had made a tail but after making it, deleting it, making it again then hating the new tail I deleted it and I'm going to make it at a later date.
Finally I started working more on my dragon head. I added facial details and moved around the horns to make them look better. I recently added a open mouth and adding teeth to the mouth but I am having a lot of trouble with making the teeth look how I want.
Here is what I have so far:
Something I learned along the way was how to extrude to my advantage. When I was making the wings I had to manipulate the extrude tool a lot to get it to do what I wanted it to. Another thing I learned is to not get in too deep over my head. I started this project without clearly thinking about how difficult it could be and I just started working on it. Next time when I start a new project I will plan better and know how hard or easy it will be. One thing I would do the same is what I did to the wings and how I manipulated them to do what I want.
Next semester I will not continue this project for a long while. You could say it is going on hiatus while I start on a new project that will hopefully hold my interest. While at first this project kept me interested and excited to animate once I kept hitting struggling problem after problem I got bored of it and dreaded working on it. Maybe next semester in-between my new project I'll work on this one and I can try to eventually complete it.
