# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Putting It All Together: A Dragon!

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# Putting it all Together: A Dragon!

I downloaded Blender without knowing much about how to use it, probably
like you. I hunted around for a good tutorial and found this one. It is
teaching me wonderful things! I have diligently followed every lesson
from the beginning, as I hope you have. Every lesson seems to contain
some valuable technique. So now it is time to put it all together into a
single project.

Hopefully, you now know

-   How to add objects, move and rotate them, scale them in various
    dimensions, and change their shape.
-   How to use proportional editing to change them even more.
-   How to parent, join and separate objects.
-   How to use materials and textures.
-   How to use images in materials.
-   How to use basic lights.
-   How to use modifiers including subsurf and array.
-   Basic use of curves
-   It will help if you know how to use a photo editor such as GIMP to
    produce seamless textures

This project will build on all that background. Since all those things
have been covered before, this will not be a key-by-key tutorial but
rather a description of the general steps to take to make the finished
scene. \_\_TOC\_\_

## Modeling from the Image

!300 px\|left\|Komodo
Dragon.jpg "300 px|left|Komodo Dragon") !Using
cubes to model the
dragon{width="300"}
!200 px\|left\|The basic body
smoothed. It
happens that the Komodo Dragon is one of my favorite creatures. Let us
start with that and let our imagination run wild. In the lesson on
**Modeling a Fox from Guide
Images**
we learned how to make a beautiful 3 dimensional wolf from an image.
(Yes, I know. The fox turned into a wolf. If you did that lesson you
understand.) Here is a nice picture of a Komodo Dragon by wallygrom from
Creative Commons with a
proper license. We can then set that picture as a background image and
apply the technique of starting with a cube and scaling it, extruding
it, scaling again and so on. We only have one view, so our imagination
and application of other pictures has to help with the top and end
views, and we have to add a nice long tail. As you build your cubes keep
in mind that you will have to create faces and extrude the legs so place
a well sized face at the proper spot.

We will use the techniques we learned to split faces and add the legs.
Be sure to provide a nice mouth to put teeth in later, and pay
particular attention to modeling the claws. I modeled one entire foot
and then duplicated it three times to have them all, and joined each one
to the body at the appropriate spot.

Once you have outlined the dragon with the cubes, remember what we
learned in **Smoothing Your Simple
Person**
and apply subsurf modifier and smooth the entire thing. You can then
push and pull on vertices to help make it look as good as possible. I
wanted to try to maintain the look of an ordinary creature and stay
close to my Komodo Dragon, rather than a huge fierce beast to take on
St. George.

## Setting the Body Materials and Textures

Use what we learned in **Image
Textures** to give
the dragon his scales. The most used technique in this tutorial is:

-   Search Flicker Creative
    Commons for a
    properly licensed picture that has a good material in it. If you use
    Google or some other search, be sure that the picture you get is
    properly licensed if you plan to share the image.
-   If your image is NOT a single seamless texture, use photo editing
    software (such as GIMP) to produce a usable seamless file.
    -   Load the image into GIMP. Crop it to a reasonable size showing a
        relatively uniform texture.
    -   Choose *Filters \> Map \> Make Seamless*. Other photo editors
        will usually have a similar operation.
    -   Save the image with a suitable file name.
-   Add a material and a texture using the image. Adjust the settings as
    needed to look good.
-   If you are following my steps, I have put all the textures in this
    article for you to copy if you wish. Click on the thumbnail image
    and go to the Wiki page from which you can download.

!266 px\|Fantasy Dragon Skin seamless
textureYou
can just select a rectangular swatch of skin from the picture and use
GIMP to make it seamless. But Komodo Dragons are a depressing color. For
a fantasy creature we need a brighter skin! So you can play with GIMP
Colorizer until you have a suitably colored swatch. I used red and gold,
but use your imagination! This becomes the first material and texture
for the dragon\'s body. It will probably be necessary to repeat the
image several times in both the X and Y directions. I used X:6 and Y:2
in this particular case.

## Adding the Eyes

thumb\|300 px\|left\|The first
rendering.The dragon needs suitably
scary eyes. Hopefully you have already modeled eyes for the
**Procedural
Eyeball**
tutorial. I chose the cat\'s eye. In **Some Assembly
Required**
we learned how to append a file. Append the Cat\'s Eye, and then work on
the color textures until you have a suitably scary dragon eye. Then
duplicate it and put one eye on each side of the dragon\'s head. I
joined the eyes to the body, but you can also just parent them if you
are careful. You will notice in later renderings that I kept playing
with the eye color and position.

## A Dragon Needs Teeth and Claws

thumb\|300 px\|left\|Assigning texture to the
clawsthumb\|100 px\|right\|Four rows
of Teeth Using the technique from
**Multiple Materials per
Object**
, isolate the claws and give them a nice shiny black material. Too much
Specularity will make the claws look like plastic, too little will make
them dull and uninteresting. I added just a little bit of Mirror also.
It will be something to experiment with until you get the look you like.
Click on the picture to enlarge it and see the setting I settled on.
Remember that you have to select the area of the mesh and ASSIGN it to
the material or you will wind up with a dragon that is black all over!
(That is the voice of sad experience speaking).

A dragon needs teeth. A lot of teeth! Modeling all those teeth would be
a big job. Fortunately we learned how to use array modifiers in
**Building a
House**. Add a
cone, scale it down very small, and extrude some more parts so you can
shape it into a nice curve. When you have a beautifully sharp tooth, add
the Array modifier and make it into a whole row of sharp teeth. Then
duplicate the whole thing three times, rotate it around as needed, and
you will have four rows of teeth, enough for both jaws. This is why we
left the mouth open when we made the original model.

## Horns, a Crest, and Nostrils

thumb\|left\|300 px\|Using the Curve
Modifierthumb\|right\|200 px\|The
color settings for the
hornsthumb\|left\|100
px\|NostrilsLets give the beast some
horns. Here we can use what we learned in **Deforming Meshes using the
Curve
Modifier**
to make some gracefully curved horns. Just as in that lesson, add a cone
and extrude segments to give a lot of vertices. Then create your Bézier
Curve and set it as a modifier to the horn mesh. Properly done your horn
will mold itself to the shape of the curve. Duplicate it and rotate it
to fit the other side of the head and put them in place.

Animal horns are some of the most beautiful structures in nature. We
should make a particularly pretty material for them. We can use the
blending colorband as in the tutorial **Basic Carpet
Texture**,
updating it a bit for 2.69, to give the horns a nice color appearance.
Then add **Subsurface
Scattering**
as taught in that tutorial, with a lot of experimenting, until you get a
really beautiful appearance. The settings I used are in the picture but
it is fun to try different things.

An impressive crest should dominate the dragon\'s back. I found a
picture of a basilisk lizard and used it as a background model for the
crest. The Crest texture was produced in GIMP exactly the same way as
the dragon skin texture.

Reptile nostrils are sort of nondescript, so lets make some nice
nostrils like a snorting bull might have. You can use the technique from
**Spin a goblet** to
model one nostril, then duplicate it, rotate the pair until they look
fierce, and give them a nice color like the dark red brown I picked.
Then put them in place and parent them to the body.

Now you can render your dragon and see the basic body shape, but
something is missing. What is it?!400 px\|Teeth, Claws, Crest and
Horns

## Giving the Dragon Wings

!200 px\|An attempt at
wings.

The wings were the hardest part, because we have not had many tutorials
in this series that dealt with the problems involved. I started with a
cylinder object and went from there, joining other cylinders to it, and
then selecting edges and using to
create faces. There may be other better ways to do it. I wanted the wing
sail parts to be semi transparent and give an appearance of shimmering
colors. Experimenting with the transparency and the materials as seen in
the screenshot gave me some I liked pretty well. I am not completely
satisfied with it but perhaps it is the best that can be done with the
tools we have so far learned. Joining the wings to the body seemed to
produce some distortions so I just parented both of them to the body
object.

Now there is just one more thing that a perfect dragon needs.

## FIRE!

thumb\|right\|300 px\|Settings for
flames!273 px\|Seamless flame
materialthumb\|left\|100
px\|Scaling the cylinders
thumb\|left\|100 px\|Distorting the
cylinders Everybody knows that
dragons breathe fire. It seems that there are many different ways to do
flames in Blender. However, I am attempting to use methods covered so
far in this tutorial series, so I wanted to experiment and see what
could be done with just what we have learned. I came up with something
reasonably close to flame breath using basic techniques. I started with
a series of cylinder objects, scaled at one end until they are almost
cones, and then stacking them inside each other. I used the proportional
editing that we learned about in **Mountains Out Of
Molehills**
to pull and stretch into some more or less random shapes. I found the
flame picture and turned it into a seamless material swatch. Then I
wrapped it around my cones and began playing with the settings for
transparency, and added an Emit setting just to see how it looked. (If
you want to jump ahead refer to Making
Fire in the next
section of this series.)

## Ground to Stand on

thumb\|left\|273 px\|seamless lava
texturethumb\|right\|300
px\|seamless grass textureNow it
is time to complete the scene by giving him something to stand on. Since
his front feet are raised, put in a sort of lava flow for him. That
seems appropriate for a dragon. Try Adding a series of cubes. Stack them
up and pull them out of shape with proportional editing. Add a subsurf
modifier, and then the set the lava rock as an image texture. Again I
made a seamless material out of a photo.

Then create a plane and again use the proportional editor to make some
nice hills. A seamless green grass texture repeated multiple times
completed the ground.

## Lighting

!100 px\|The No Shadow
settingSo far the
lighting has just been the default point light. I think it is a bit more
dramatic to use the Sun style of lamp. As we learned in **Light a
Silver
Goblet** go
to *Add\>Lamp\>Sun* and place a sun type lamp rather high in the sky.
You will notice that now you get two overlapping shadows, one from the
Sun and one from the default point lamp. You could just delete the point
lamp, but, to advance beyond what has already been covered, it is useful
as fill lighting. You can select the point lamp, go to the properties
panel and click on the light
icon![](Blender-2.5_lamp_radio_button.png "Blender-2.5_lamp_radio_button.png").
Scroll down to Shadow and click No Shadow and the point light becomes a
fill light. Setting the horizon color in the world panel
![](Blender268TextureIconWorld.png "Blender268TextureIconWorld.png") is
the last step to produce this scene.

# THE FINAL RESULT

thumb\|center\|700 px\|The Final
Result

I think it nicely combines pretty much all I have learned about Blender
so far in the tutorial! If you want to try your hand at a project, it is
not as hard as you might think. You and I have really learned a lot by
going through the first two sections of**Blender 3D:Noob to Pro**. I
thank all the authors who have worked hard to bring us to this point.

I challenge you to show off what you can do with your newly acquired
knowledge and put your finished work up here. It will probably be a lot
better than mine.

# Noob Project No.02 - Space Dragon in Space

First off, thanks for creating this page! What a wonderful idea to
include all the good readers in a final project! This is what openness
is all about, and this wiki platform is the perfect place to be doing
it. Also, huge thanks to whoever originally wrote this tutorial. Whoever
you are, nameless stranger, you\'re doing excellent work.
thumb\|right\|300 px\|A Quick
Sketch

Moving on, I knew I wanted my dragon to live in space and shoot lasers,
so the first thing I did was sketch him out so I had some sort of plan
before beginning the tedious busy-work.

I think this is technically called a \"wyvern.\" Anyway, with this
general idea in mind, I began extruding a cube to bound out the basic
shape, keeping in mind how it\'s internal skeleton would look and behave
(if dragons were real of course) The wing hand and knuckle bits were
kind of tricky. For those, I extruded a long rectangle for the arm, and
added a few loop-cuts at the end, which i extruded into fingers. Tricky
and finicky. thumb\|left\|250 px\|He looks like a chestburster with
wings. There\'s probably a better
way to do this. While editing, I recommend using a mirror modifier, but
be careful of vertices on the negative side of your mirror. Best thing
to do would be cut your model in half along its axis of symmetry and
then apply the mirror. Otherwise, vertices can show up on the positive
side where you don\'t notice them until you\'re almost done modeling.
Have fun cleaning that up\... I did. **Select \> Select All by Trait
\>** helps a lot with this, and as always, remember to remove doubles
every now and then! After several hours, here\'s the basic, blocky model
of a wyvern I made.

Next I made some teeth. Cone with 3 verts \> Curve modifier \> Array x
37 thumb\|left\|200 px \|What a pretty
smile! Now, those teeth look a
little small, and I suppose 37 rows of teeth is a little much for
anyone, even if their mouth is 4.76 meters long. Next time, I\'ll
probably give him less teeth, and just make them all a little bigger.

I wanted to make a U/V map and draw some real nice textures on this
thing, but we hadn\'t gotten there in the tutorial yet, and I figured
I\'d follow the precedent. Besides, I don\'t properly know how to do one
anyway. So I opened up the GIMP and drew some neat looking scale
textures. Actually, first, I looked up scales on Wikipedia (and learned
that scales grow from the epidermis and are weaker than *scutes*, which
grow from the deeper dermis, and so are more durable, among other
differences. It\'s cool stuff, for sure.) So I pulled up some images of
scutes from the internet, and I got to work. I made my textures super
low resolution (32x32 I think) cause I wanted that retro/late-90s
rendering look. Haven\'t you heard? It\'s all the rage these days! It
also helps with rendering times on my craptop computer. Just check out
this YouTube
playlist
I was listening to while I made it. thumb\|left\|350 px\|Now with
textures and materials! \...and 90% less
sugar

Of course that strange position he\'s in looks uncomfortable, not to
mention it would probably make for a unexciting rendering. So I gave him
some bones for him to orient into a more natural position with. The
toughest thing about making an armature has got to be symmetry. At its
very best, it\'s tedious. At its worst, it\'s torture. I know there\'s a
way to edit armatures with a mirror modifier in blender, but I couldn\'t
find it, and anyway, I finished up alright. A thing to note: If you\'ve
gotten pretty far along and you find you need to delete a bone in the
middle of your armature, you can rejoin the ends by selecting them and
hitting **Ctrl + P \> Connected** To keep your armature in the same
position, reposition the ends with cursor to selected then selected to
cursor. thumb\|right\|250 px\|Now he\'s got some bones on that
meat!

Next, I wanted him to shoot lasers out of his mouth instead of fire,
cause ya know\... He\'s in space. So I opened up the GIMP again and made
a texture to wrap around a tube that would be the beam.
thumb\|left\|250 px\|That didn\'t come out
right\... Lots
of lightning and sparks everywhere\... It was cool. The beam itself was
a tube with a blue material on it---full emit, can\'t receive shadows,
slightly transparent, and full translucency. I slapped my texture on and
put the tube in the beast\'s mouth. I duplicated that tube with **Alt +
D** and shrunk it a little on its local !Z axis (**Shift + D**) so it
would shine through. Inside the dragon\'s mouth and down the length of
the tube i stuck a few point lights with the energy turned up to 11.

Actually it only goes to 10. Maybe those guys at blender should fix
that.

To get the beautiful starfield you see in the background I went into the
GIMP, filters \> noise \> hurl (what a great name for this thing btw),
and desaturated the picture with colors \> desaturate. Yep. Simple as
that. There\'s probably something you can do right from Blender with
procedural textures, but either way, sky texture! getting it to show up
in the view took me some searching. I didn\'t remember how we\'d done it
from earlier in the tutorial. Anyway that sort of repetition helps the
memory.

center\|AAAAAAHHHHH!!
**`<big>`{=html}`<big>`{=html}`<big>`{=html}`<big>`{=html}`<big>`{=html}AAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!`</big>`{=html}`</big>`{=html}`</big>`{=html}`</big>`{=html}`</big>`{=html}**

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