• 🍪 Blender Basics Explore Library Guided Playlists Live Streams Articles Podcast Downloads Collabs Educators: Blender Teaching Guide What's Coming Soon Upgrade your membership
  • Questions & Answers Student Gallery Discord Channel YouTube Channel Citizen Membership Perks ✨
  • Kent Trammell Jonathan Lampel Wayne Dixon Paul Caggegi
    • Full Library
    Gallery

    Dragon's Peak Final

    William Crespo(willcrespo)
    1 love
    This started as a simple Idea. I wanted to get better at sculpting since the sharks, so I decided to sculpt something with easy geometry, a Dragon. I was inspired by Eastern Styled Dragons from shows I watched as a kid like DBZ. Cut to a week later and I never want to see a hair particle system again. Thanks to CG Cookie and all of you for helping me achieve this one. I spent hours on various videos and posts trying to learn how to achieve this look in Eevee, and I have to say I'm pretty happy with the results.
    6 Comments
    Add a Comment
    • Ingmar Franz(duerer)

      Absolutely breathtaking 😀👍!

      Reply
    • Paul Rikkers(paulrikkers)

      willcrespo Yeah, performance when editing hair has been a huge issue for me in the past as well. Think it often has something to do with the subsurf or multires modifiers on the mesh, or the modifier order, but I'm really no expert.

      A few settings I like to play with (if you haven't already) are:
      -In the particles tab, go to render>timing>random. If you play with the slider it randomizes the length of each child particle.

      -Children>clumping. increasing it will make the ends of the hairs stick together more, which tends to look good for fur.

      -Children>roughness. Adds some random noise to the hair. Be careful with these cause the results can get nuts. One cool trick is to increase the random value quite a bit to make the hair go everywhere, and then set the threshold slider to like 0.8 or something, so only a few hairs are effected. This creates some rogue clumps of hair that stick out.

      -Children>kink. Can make the hair more wavy.

      Reply
    • wardred

      Clarification - in an animated image they might be running up and down the length of the dragon and/or orbiting it which would be a lot clearer.

      Reply
    • wardred

      willcrespo - Wow.

      The only thing I was confused about were the electric ball things along the torso.

      They work well on the tail, but in a static image I'm not sure what they're doing around the body.

      The ones on the right almost look like a background sun(s), but are in front of the dragon. The ones on the left follow the curve of the dragon, but on the right, the second orb in particular, is a little confusing.

      Reply
    • William Crespo(willcrespo) author

      paulrikkers Thanks for the comment. Yeah, I had finished the dragon itself within a day, but spent about a week trying to get hair to work in eevee. There really wasnt much out there to help me since Im not doing a Human or full fur animal hair, though I absorbed all I could from them. Even just something like a horse's mane would have helped immensely but really I found nothing. And the particles kept doing a number on my computational power, which made experimenting frustrating and painfully slow. I had originally wanted to animate the scene and have the hair blowing in the wind, but in the end I decided to just do my best to groom what hair I had. As the really point of the piece was to sculpt a dragon. I just kept getting carried away. Personally I had felt like the more bristle-y hair fit the electro look I was going for, but Im totally up for suggestions on how to improve it and the workflow.

      Reply
    • Paul Rikkers(paulrikkers)

      Impressive! Really digging this, the graininess kinda gives it a painterly vibe to me and the colours make it look pretty epic.
      My only critique would be that the dragon's hair looks a little like hard bristles in some places, the way it sticks out (on the left it's especially noticeable). Like you said though, particles suck :P
      Keep it up!

      Reply