Midnight Dragon

Ahh “Midnight Dragon” was pretty much the one that started me off on rendering Dragons. It’s one of those things I really enjoy doing on this side, as it never crosses with my main client work (even doing games, I’ve never had a project that required a dragon !).

The curious thing is, I also tend to use it as a yardstick now, comparing the capabilities of new software vs the tech that was available in the past. Midnight Dragon, here was done wayy back in 2002 and as such there were no sculpting utilities available, no normal mapping, no functional displacement mapping, basic shading etc, and god forbid you use more than 30k polys. This guy was entirely modelled and rendered poly-by poly (cut, extrude, move) in Maya (Maya 4, if I remember right)