Splinterlands Art Contest! // Week 178 // Dragon Whelp, ready to help!

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"Dragon Whelp, ready to help!"

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Chaos had arrived! Dragon Whelp is ready to join the fight! Now a spine-chilling fully-grown dragon, this once adorable creature is taking-off to aid its kind in defending their borders.

Hello everyone! I'm proud to present to you my entry for this week's Splinterlands Art Contest entitled "Dragon Whelp, ready to help!".

For this artwork, I've decided to take i up a notch. Scratch that. I've decided to take it up way past my limits. I've decided to create a full 3D model of a living creature and create an animation for it. And what could be the best model for it? Well, I'm not so sure too, but if you visit my previous works, you will realize that most of my entries tend to favor a certain creature - a dragon.

After browsing the current set of cards available, I have stumbled upon the dragon whelp. An adorable dragon, perfect for an "easy" (or so I thought) model for me. After some time, I realized that I wanted a fiercer dragon. But since I don't want it to be too complicated, I decided to create an older version of the Dragon Whelp.

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Medium and Software:

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Hardware: Personal Computer Unit

Software: Autodesk Maya and Adobe Photoshop CC

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Step-by-step:

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This is how I created my animated 3D artwork:

For my 3D model, I have decided to use a plane as a base and created the outline of the head of the model.

Using the created plane, I made upper part of the head.

The upper part of the head is duplicated and modified to create the lower part of the head.

Both parts were combined to create the head of the model. Two spheres were made to serve as the eyes. The upper part was again modified to create other facial features of the model.

Certain part of the head us used and extended to create the body of the dragon.

Limbs and claws were added.

Wings were created by extending certain parts of the shoulders.

Fins were also added from the top of the head to the end of the tail.

Now that the 3D model has been completed, textures were created using blender and were added to the 3D model. The ground was also created and textures were added.

"Skeleton" were added to rig the model.

After rigging the model, a simple animation was created. There have been some problem with the eyes during animation that was why the two spheres for the eyes were deleted. Lightings and textures were adjusted to as needed. The ground was also adjusted to create a terrain for the background of the scene. After the finishing touches, the final output is as displayed at the beginning of this post.

Again, I thank you guys for reading up to this point. If you have seen some of my works, maybe you noticed that I haven't been able to create an entry for more or less two (2) months now. I have been too busy before due to preparation for holiday break. Then, work has started to take up more of my time now as I have been assigned to a new project right after holiday break. I've also had a long break in playing the game. I have been working for this artwork for quite a long time already, with very little accomplishment per day, but the result still makes me think that all the efforts were worth it. I hope you like it too guys!

I would greatly appreciate it if you can upvote and share my post. You may also write your comments and ideas below. I will be happy to read your thoughts about this! Also, if you are interested in my other posts, you may visit my account and view them.

This is it for now, see you again next time!

Reference:

Model for Dragon Whelp was based on the in-game card from Splinterlands.