Black Dragon

Another Dragon, this one was commissioned for the book by Shayne Easson over at Phantasy Ink. Again, fabulous, fabulous people to work with, and I sincerely hope they sell bucketloads (especially with the new huge trend for eBooks that the iPad has spawned)

Demon Head

This guy is unfinished, but I got distracted at the same time as Blizzard had their big Diablo 3 announcement. With that in mind, I thought it was good to let him go as practice, rather than feel like I was jumping on the trend (there would be bound to be a lot of Diablo fan art with that kind of announcement).

Red Dragon

Similar to the Blue Dragon (Midght Dragon) this guy was entire modelled by poly (slice, extrude, move) but this time in 3DS Max, as part of the process of learning that package for a larger project. As a yardstick, this one really helped me by having the Blue Dragon to compare to. It’s amazing to look at it now, as it’s embarrassingly “rubbery” when I look at it, I’d LOVE to revisit this guy with modern sculpting approach.

Strangley (even though it makes me sqirm to look at this now, as does most old artwork) it was phenominally popular at the time, and even ended up front page as an article on CGSociety.org!   There’s a “making of” the dragon article as well, which I’ll put here as soon as the rest of the content of this site is ready.

Mercedes Monster

Mercedes Monster was requested for an advertising campaign a few years back. They intended to push the “beast under the hood” as a real monster presumably to appeal to that part of the market they were missing out on (hey, I never question these things!). It was supposed to be very organic, but include elements of the car and engine design (note the bizarre nostril/logo layout).

Mercedes Monster Head

Casplade

I’d not done any character work for a while at this time, and then I was asked by the guys over at DeviantArt for a “Dark” themed image for their 2004 (done in 2003) Calender.  It also seemed like a perfect excuse to get this guy out of my head.

Entirely modelled in Max (polygon box modelling) and textured in photoshop.  Again, please bear in mind the poly limits available at that time, let alone the modelling tools – Vanilla max, no mudbox/Zbrush/BodyPaint etc.

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)