Create a DRAGON in Blender (for 3D Printing)

in this video I show you how I created this dragon here from start to finish in blender 2.79 this video is more for advanced users and it's a mixture of time-lapse and tutorial so on the one hand you will learn my workflow and on the other hand you will learn many cool tips and tricks along the way if you just want to watch certain parts check the chapter marks in the video description below so enjoy [Music] I want egg here thanks for checking out my channel here you learn the best tips and tricks to boost your blender skills and to create beautiful 3d art yeah a few weeks ago I was contacted by Danny he's running this YouTube channel 3d printed tabletops so he is a 3d printing guy and he wanted to start these kickstart campaign where he wanted to like offer 3d models of dragons for the Baker's which they can download and 3d print at home so and he asked me if I can create this special forest dragon which will be an exclusive offer for all the Baker's of this kickstart campaign yeah and I felt this was a nice idea so I created this dragon and then he started his kickstart campaign which is called The Lost dragons 3d printable fantasy dragons and his initial fundraising goal was $4,000 and this campaign was funded in just two hours and all in all he collected eighty six thousand dollars in this kickstarter campaign which is pretty impressive and although the campaign is already over you still can get the late pledges as far as I understand so you still can get all these dragons just head over to the kickstart campaign page link in the video description below yeah and certainly I recorded the whole process of this dragon but this took me arround about 30 hours and I don't just want it to put like the 30 hours somehow into eternity this would be kind of boring and probably much too fast so I decided to go another route by creating a full dedicated video where I show you the whole process so this is a mixture of tutorials and time lapses so that you can enjoy the full benefit of this yeah this dragon was fully created in blender 2.79 so this tutorial is also based on blender 2.79 this nice renderings you just saw I created an Eevee in blender 2.8 the alpha version it's not a stable version out for blender 2.8 yet and at the end of the video I also show you a short set up on how I created this screen material for this dragon in blender 2.8 but the rest of the video is planar 2.7 so very special in this video you're watching right now and the 3d model of the Dragon will be added to my mastering scouting workshop in the next couple of days so if you've got the mastering sculpting course already then you got this a scree update and for all the people that didn't have it already today November 23rd is Black Friday so you can get my mastering sculpting course 30% off until the end of Monday 26 if you want to grab this deal check out the link in the video description and so me if you're watching this video later you still can get this mastering sculpting workshop but yet without a discount sorry yeah and by the way if you Scout a lot you probably also enjoy my free blender sculpting chichi with all the important shortcuts for blender scalp mode link in the video description below okay before we get started one final warning here I'm using a quite powerful computer the specs you can find down below in the video description and in order to sculpt these very high-resolution sculpt things you need a powerful computer in order to have fun while sculpting so keep this in mind and also in order to get good at sculpting you need a lot of practice and you need to put a lot of time into this and very soon we start with sculpt January 2019 this is an event where you can practice sculpting over 31 days and you can win some pretty nice prizes if you want to learn more about this check the link in the video description alright it without further blahblah let's get started so the first thing I needed to do was to put together some references because actually for this dragon I didn't had any concept so basically I had to create this really dragon while thinking about how this should look like and what helped me a lot was just putting together some references and for this I used the tool pure ref which is super awesome it's free and you just can drag and drop images into this infinitive canvas and all of them group them and stuff like this to have all your references in place so even with high resolution this is really nice so I just grabbed of references I think this references I got from Denny just to get the idea what he wants and then I grabbed some other references from tree creatures and stuff like this I think this down here also served quite a lot as reference and then some 3d stuff for some ideas and inspiration for scales and stuff like this and this stuff up here some 3d printed images because actually this was my first sculpting design for 3d printing and yeah I just grabbed a bunch of images to check how 3d prints are usually made in terms of thickness of parts and details and stuff like this so super handy tool and what I really like about this if you just open up your browser and google for some images you just can drag and drop in into pure F and also with some shortcuts rotate them or scale them really handy link to this tool in the video description so after I got my references in place I started to build my base mesh and since I didn't had any concept I just started modeling and over the time it evolved into the pose which I wanted to create which I had in mind the training should sit on this broken tree this was my concept and idea for this project so I had to somehow turn it into a 3d shape and in the base mesh creation phase I try to keep it as simple as possible in order to keep this flexible so I can easily move parts and shapes around to try out different poses to try out different shapes I added the major parts like big horns to the body already to really get an idea on what I want here yeah and this really helped me to basically create a concept in 3d already which I can use to sculpt on later on yeah and as you can see with this very simple shapes it's easy to adjust the pose so I can add the legs I can add the wings and the arms and it's really easy to move around without spending hours on creating something here so and yeah this served as foundation later on to sculpt on actually all right now let's take a look on what techniques are used to create the base mesh because here I used several different techniques to create all the different parts so let's start with the tree here this was just super basic mesh modeling like loop cuts extrusion stuff like this the branches are just sticked into the tree just to give me an idea where I want to put the plancha's and how the training should sit on this tree here then the body of the Dragon was created with a curve if I switch to edit mode you can see we have this line here which is the curve basically and if you want to add a mesh around the curve you can do it over here in the object data tab first of all under shape you have to set the fill type to full and then go to geometry increase the depth and the resolution and then you have something which looks like a cable and if you select a vertex here you can simply press alt s to scale single vertices which is pretty nice so you can define the thickness of the body in different areas later on if you want to sculpt on the curve you have to convert this into a mesh by pressing alt C and select mesh from curve meters of text if I click on this you can see this was converted into a mesh then the head was simply created with awesome mesh modeling and subsurf modifier on it also if you want to use the subdivisions later on for sculpting you have to apply this and the next technique I used was the skin modifier modeling let's call it this way here I used three different modifiers let's turn them off and you can see all I did was simply create some edges here so this is no curve for anything this is a simple edge so create a cube delete everything except one vertex and then extrude this and then you can create simple edges also I used a mobile modifier to mirror this but this I already applied in this file here then I added subsurf modifier to smooth out the edges to have a more curvy look then I added a skin modifier which generates a mesh around the edges and also similar to the curves if you select a vertex with ctrl a you can scale the single vertices and then you can easily extrude stuff if you like and with control a scale this to change the shape here and then I added another subsurf modifier to add a higher resolution which is always nice if you want to go over to scalp mode later on and if you want to move over to scalp mode you have to apply all the modifiers in order to make this work same thing I did for the wings as you can see if I turn off the skin modifier and the other modifiers you can see this are just a few edges put it together super simple in terms of adjusting the shape and also the same thing I did for the legs of the arms and the toes but don't forget to apply all the modifiers before you switch over to scalp mode and over here this is actually a simple plane so just a simple plane shape some loop cuts edited and then I added a solidify modifier to add thickness and the subsurf modifier to smooth out the area so and now after you have created your shapes and wanted to start sculpting you as mentioned before have to apply all the modifiers and in order to connect different pieces to each other you have to use a boolean operation and if you're using blender 2.79 I recommend go to file user preferences add-ons and search for bool tool and nail lists save the user settings if you want to keep this add-on active and then you can select more objects press T and on the tool you'll find the pool tools add-on and under Auto boolean you simply click on Union and then you can see both objects were really cut into each other and if I now switch to sculpt mode enable dynamic topology constant details let's increase a detail size here a bit and now let's use a clay strips brush and if I turn this increases even more you can see I can really connect these pieces so and certainly you also have to do this with all the other parts so now we are switching over to sculpting and I started with the tree but before I can actually sculpt on the tree I have to do one thing first of all I can isolate the tree by pressing slash on the numpad or if you don't have an ampere to go down here to a few few global local if you click on that you will be in the local view and only see the selected objects if you click on few few global/local again or press numpad slash then you're back so if we switch to edit mode you can see that the branches are not really connected with the trunk here and this is really important in order to use this for sculpting and that's why we have two boolean these objects together as shown before but in order to do this all the branches has to be separate objects and the easiest way to do this is by pressing P in edit mode and click on by loose parts that means if I now switch back to object mode all the parts in edit mode which are not connected will be separated as individual objects and now I can select them all select the trunk as last object click on Union and now everything is really unified as one big object as you can see and this is perfect to start the sculpting process in order to start the sculpting process what I usually do is go to sculpt mode certainly the object need to be selected I enable dynamic topology switch the detail type method to constant each hair and check the mesh resolution it's relatively low so let's increases most of the time I double or triple the resolution to start let's try 30 and I am mainly started with the clay strips brush and now I can start sculpting here and was shift I use the smooth brush to smooth out the areas so yeah this shouldn't be a full sculpting tutorial but this is my setup which I use to start sculpting and now let's check out the time lapse so for the tree the fur thing I did I was smoothing out the transition between the branches and the trunk and then I started to add the major shapes so at this stage no little bark texture sculpting or anything like this I just wanted to get an idea of the general shape of the tree with a snake oak brush I also pulled out some more roots and branches and in general I gave the tree a more twisted look which to me felt a little bit more like this very old tree and after I was done with some major shapes I turned on the drain again and adjusted the tree and also the training a bit to fit to the shape of the tree yeah the next step was the head because the head is I would say the major part of the training the first thing you look at which needs to look cool and since I didn't had any idea at this point on how I wanted to sculpt all the details on the dragon I just used the head as object to experiment on so the stuff I'm sculpting here for example I will moved later on and started again and this I did several times actually I also added some eyes as reference where I want to place the eyes later on and this really important at them as separate objects so you can sculpt all the details around the eye without deforming the actual eye which is really important so as you can see here I've changed the horns because I felt I wanted to create this that looks a little bit more like a forest dragon so one idea I had was why not and changing the horns a bit more so that it looks like a stack which I think was a very good idea so the jeez I also added using the skin modifier technique which I showed you at the beginning combined with a mirror modifier it was solitary easy to place them on both sides for the head in this moment I added quite a lot of details which is relatively unusual for this face of the sculpting process because at the start you want to keep the whole thing relatively low in resolution to just define the major shapes but here I just wanted to try out what I want to have in terms of details for the rest of the body so all these tiny details I add here basically I remove them later on again to add different kind of shapes and this I did several times during the creation process there was a lot of trial and error involved and research on what I want to do so then I switched over to the main horns here I added some details also to get an idea how the horns should look like in terms of details and structure which turned out pretty nice I think so afterwards relatively happy with the result of the head which I will change later on by the way I went over to the body and later on the limbs to skull the major shapes to get a better feel of the overall shapes and weight of the dragon so at this stage I kept a resolution relatively low and just you know wanted to deform these very simple looking shapes at the moment I also try to apply some of the shapes I created on the head onto the body but later on I realized that this isn't really the way to go here first of all I added some shapes to the body later on also I created the limbs I use some human references to get some of the model structures right just to make the feel of it look natural by the way in order to get symmetry right on a non symmetrical sculpting I have a separate video which you can watch where I show you some different techniques on how to achieve this also I try to keep the different parts of the limbs separate as long as needed because if you merge everything at the beginning and limbs are very close to the body it's really hard to gulped in between the body and the limbs so try to keep them separate sculpt all the major shapes maybe also some details and then later on if you have the main shapes in place then you can enjoin all this parts together using the boolean operation which I showed you a bit earlier where it's scouting the dragon firstly I started with selects and I started this as one whole object and I realized later on that I need to pose this so posing for scalp mode the easiest way you can do it is by cutting things into pieces like here on the arm just to have everything separate intersecting each other and then you can pose this and then later on if you have the perfect pose and you can merge everything with a boolean operation so but I had the whole leg here already so what I did I was cutting this into pieces again there are several ways to do it here I show you one quick way how you can do it versa press slash on the number 8 to isolate the leg maybe we'll take this a bit if you like then I use the bool tools again which I showed you earlier and I use a draw poly brush tool to draw a simple shape then press ENTER to create the shape and now we have this kind of boxy shape here I apply the modifier and I add a simple solidify modifier let's press Z for the wireframe mode and now you can see the solidify modifier adds thickness so I just add a little bit of sickness here also apply this and then I select the shape then we'll shift the leg and then I use the auto bullying tool with difference then this shape will be cut off from the leg and now you can see we have these two lines here so now this is still one big object and in order to separate them switch to edit mode press P to separate these parts and click by loose parts then everything which is not connected to each other will be separated as one object now we still have the problem that the origin of our object is still up here but we need it to be like here to have a certain pivot point to rotate these objects better for posing so and a quick way to do it is simply go to edit mode select everything move this around and you can see the origin stays where it is and if I switch back to object mode we have the new position so same thing over here put it here and same thing over here since we're sculpting it doesn't have to be like perfect in terms of the position since we will use sculpting later on anyway to merge all these shapes it doesn't really matter if you move this around freely so now I can easily parent these parts select this one then this control P set parent that means this part is attached to this one here if I move this around and then this to this control P set parent object and now I can easily pose the leg a little bit so let's go back to the dragon and now I can easily pose this then you can also parent the toes to the foot here and then it's relatively easy to pull this quickly and then we can go over to sculpt mode and start sculpting here smoothing in the shape here adding a little bit of blob over here so that the parts are intersecting with each other more and let's imagine now we are done with sculpting the major shapes and maybe also some details on the different parts the pose is perfect and then simply select both of them and unify them with the pool tool add-on and then back in sculpt mode we can smooth this area here sculpt on this and then we have a nice leg with a new pose again at this stage I had many different objects but everything was colored in the same gray color so it was relatively hard for me to see what's separated and what not so I simply applied some different materials to the objects to better see the difference luckily in blender 2.8 which is the next big release we have a very nice feature which we can enable for the viewports so that every object has automatically a different color so yeah cool feature is coming up in the next release of blender so yeah actually at this moment I tried keep the details similar to the head but overall it found it's a little bit too messy to me so somehow I wanted to find a more clear way to create the details also I wanted to have more like a larger details on the back and then more like a skin or smaller details on the belly and lower body of the Dragon so actually quite some of the time of the creation process I try to find the kind of details I wanted to use and actually I tried several different styles on a small part of the Dragon we moved them and try it again and again and yeah here's a small compilation of all the different things I tried [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] what you might think now is impressive but what a waste of time well not really I tested a lot of different techniques I haven't tested before and actually I found different techniques I will use for the final sculpting of the details which I show you a little bit later but for now I decided to go on with the major shapes because I want to layer the details on top of the major shapes so I started to add a little bit more fat wrinkles and all this stuff to get a better idea overall off the dragon I also added some more details to the toes I decided to remove some of the details of the head then in the next step I wanted to sculpt the transition between the upper legs in the upper arms because there I also wanted to sculpt some winkles and so on and this I just can do when everything is merge together same thing I did with a lower part of the wings then I also merged the hands and the feet with the lower legs but still separated from the rest of the body and then in step by step I merged all these different parts together sculpted the transitions and then at the end I basically had the oval shape in place so that I only needed to add all the details so since I changed the pose of the wings over the time the base mesh I've created didn't fit anymore so I had to recreate the skin between the finger kind of things of the wings so and for this I created a very simple plane similar as shown before and added a solidify and a subsurf modifier to add thickness and to smoothen the surface so here's a simple tip on how to place a new skin between those fingers here as you can see this should intersect a bit with the arms here or the fingers so later on it will be easy to merge these things together and if i duplicate this edge here this can take quite some time to place everything where it belongs to and here's a simple trick down here let's enable snapping snap element let's use volume and a snap target let's use median that means if I now move something around it will be always in the center of two surfaces which are lying behind each other so if i duplicate this stuff you can see it's always in the center of the arm here so now and it's extrude this with e place the stuff over here with control R let's add some loop cuts place them in here move this around a bit don't forget to turn snapping off if you want to make some other changes which should not be placed inside here and then as you can see really quick you can add this skin between the wings and this is what I did for the whole wings as you can see I added quite a bunch of loop cuts later on all the fine details i sculpt a little bit later with a brushed texture so this is a dragon I had at this stage basically everything is merged except all the horns the skin and the toes there I just wanted to add some further details later on so this parts I just merged at the end of the sculpting process and right now I wanted to go over to create all the nice scales and details on the surface but if you are using dynamic topology and go very high with a resolution it becomes really really slow and a nice workaround is either to just subdivide the whole mesh with a relatively high subdivisions apply the modifier and then start sculpting this works or if you're using the multiverse modifier and in order to use the multi s modifier so that it works perfectly you need to create a quad based mesh so that the whole mesh is created out of quads not triangles as we have now so there are a few add-ons which can do this for this I used the paid add-on from the blender market dune we mesh there's also another paid ad on the Tessa later and the free external tool called instant meshes which are all more or less doing the same thing all the links to the add-ons and tools you'll find in the video description below so right here I just want to show you this with this doing we mesh so I click on we mesh and this is not creating a perfect mesh at all but if we are zooming in it creates a mesh which consists out of quads faces with four vertices which we now can use for the modulus modifier so let's go back to object mode you can see the new mesh is just placed above the old one so what we have to do right now we have to go to the object tab down here on the display disable a wire and disable xwy because with x-ray it will be placed above all other objects so we always see it in front so what we have to do right now we have to go to the modifiers add a mold view resolution modifier then let's hide the other one and now we can subdivide this by clicking the subdivide button and now you can see more subdivisions will be added to the dragon so you can go as high as your computer can handle but keep in mind this will subdivide every face on the object so if you subdivide this to high your poly count will explode anyway now we can go into sculpt mode and start sculpting relatively smooth without turning dynamic topology on and we have a relatively high detail size here and now I can add all the nice details I want and I always can turn off the multiverse modifier to turn down the resolution if I want to have a smooth running viewport and if you have the multiverse modifier on you can go to the options over here in Scalf mode and enable fast navigate so every time you rotate around your object it will change to a lower resolution which makes the process also much faster so yeah this is pretty nice to add all these tiny details later on and if you want to learn a little bit more about these technique and other tools which you can use check out my other video where I show you how to create high resolution sculpting's in blender so after I had my Auto retopo and my motorways modifier on the mesh I started to create the large scales on the upper side of the body and for this I mainly used masks which I then extrude yeah now let's check out how this works so I have to say this time was the first time on sculpting that I used masks intensively and there are different ways to draw masks but in general the mask system in blender is relatively limited so here are the tools that I used mostly first of all we have the mask wash shortcut is M here we can define the strengths I would put this to one then basically I draw the mask if you want to have sharper edges you can go to curve use this one here for example and then as you can see you can have this very sharp edges but we have to fill in this manually if you want to invert the mask simply hold down ctrl then you can erase areas like here for example and you can set the mask to smooth maybe use a smoother curve as well and then as you can see you can smooth out areas which is unfortunately not that fast as you can see so this is one method and then we have a few more options down here we have for example the box mask you can clear all masks with all dem and what I used a lot is the lesser mask with shift control left click so that means no matter what brush you have selected if you now hit control shift and to always left-click you can basically draw the shape of the scale you want to pull out and this was the major tool I was using for creating the scales but this tool has one big problem no matter what you do it always draws through the whole body as you can see and there's at this point no option to turn this off so you have to take care that you don't draw anything like for example here which could intersect with the masks you already have one so definitely take care about this and there's one hidden option if you open up the operator panel down here and let's say I wanna a ways apart so this year you have to draw the mask first and then down here you have to switch to value inverted then you can see it will be subtracted from the other mask and now this mode is on as long as I said this to value again but as you can see always a last mask will be inverted so that's also a little bit weird would be nice to have like a third button you can press to invert the lasso mask but yeah this is basically how i drawn all the masks so and if you have this very sharp edges certainly I would use the mask brush we'd use the strengths set this to smooth and then smooth out this a bit so after you've worn all the masks for the different scales you hit ctrl I to invert the mask now you can see the whole body is isolated except the areas here and now let's switch over to the clay strips brush then we have this plane offset this is basically a value that if I draw above this here you can see it will be lifted up and this easy you can pull this stuff out then either smooth this with a smooth brush or use the flat brush to flatten the areas a bit then I used the crease brush the inverted crease brush so I hold down control to over these edges here to lift this up a bit on one side and with a flat brush I flatten this bit on the other side which all dem you also can disable the mask to smooth out the transitions between the body and the scales and then the last thing I did I used a very pointy curve something like this with a relatively high strength I enable pressure sensitivity for the radios for my drawing tablet and then I had drawn in this lines here so that this looks a little bit like what of all this was a very time-consuming process because this is just pure you work so now let's enjoy a short time lapse on how I painted all the masks and created all the scales on the body [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so as next step I went over to adding all the details the first thing I did I was adding some big winkles to the skin of the wings for this I mainly used a very strong crease brush and the clay strips brush from time to time just to have the larger shapes in place so and then I went over to add all the details and like the skin details for the wings and later on also on smaller scales on the body and for this I used some brush textures that means this black and white textures also called alphas they are a bunch of free resources to download such textures I purchased a pack with 52 reagan textures i used here i linked my resources down below in the video description i also increased the resolution for the horns added some more details and also with brush texture I added some more of these kind of cracks to make this look even more high detailed so then I wanted to add the small scales but I just wanted to add them on the lower body part so what I did is I mask out the complete area where I have created all the large scales so I created a new mask after this I smoothed out the transition between the masks a bit just to have a nicer transition between the small and the large scales yeah and then I grabbed a brush texture and started to add all this nice little scales to the lower body and this was really fun to do because it was so fast compared to create all the large scales then I also used a bark texture for creating the bark on the tree which was a little bit detailed for my taste so I smoothed out the whole thing afterwards a bit and with the crease brush I also added some more details and then also I used a brush texture and added some more details to the ground this stones and rocks and also this kind of roots so that the tree looks a little bit more connected with the ground so now let's take a look how to use such brush textures in blender first of all I select the dragon then switch over to sculpt mode then usually I select the sculpt wall brush open textures create new then switch over to the textures open then navigate to the folder where you have your brush textures and double-click on this then for the settings I would suggest to set the brush mapping to area plane then it will be extruded basically along the normals of each face and not from our view so we don't have any stretching in there and I think the best way to use it is to go to stroke and set the stroke method to anchor it so that means we can click and hold and draw the brush basically certainly what you have to adjust is the strengths up here so that it works for you so and here's a little trick if the brush texture it has too much right areas it can be that you get this bump so not only the details but also this lifted up area which looks not so nice if you have all these bumps here all over the place so what you can do go to texture and down here you have the sample PS and with this you can basically define the height so if I set this to a negative value we are going more and more inwards so let's set this to negative 0.5 and then we have with this brush pretty perfect result and if I increases even more you can see we have this bump to the inside basically so this keep in mind and then when you draw your brushstrokes make sure that each of them is intersecting a bit with the one next to it okay after hours done we're sculpting all the details this was basically what I had and you can see on the different colors this are still parts which are separated so on this dragon was created for 3d printing and at this stage all the different objects are intersecting each other and this is not really useful for 3d printing as far as I know I'm not an expert when it comes to 3d printing so everything on the 3d printing side was managed by Danny so what I did was to pooling all the objects I still had together so that means for the main body here this thing I applied the multiverse modifier with the highest resolution and then using the bool tool I basically selected two objects one after another and then I used the auto boolean Union to unify everything first of all I unified the toes and also sculpted on the transitions a bit but in general especially if you have very complex shapes and intersecting parts and if your model is not that large it can happen that you have a lot of problems with boolean operations for example if you unify two things then you got problems like something suddenly disappears and will not be joined and stuff like this so there are a couple of ways how to solve this so first of all you have to make sure that all your normals are correct then that the scale is applied and if all this doesn't work then there's a trick which helped me a lot in many cases so if I did everything to clean up the mesh and so on but still the boolean doesn't work the one thing that helped me is to scale up the whole model so what I did here for the dragon I selected everything then was shift C I we Center the 3d cursor to the center of my scene then down here I click on pivot point and set this to 3d cursor that means my pivot point is always on the position of the 3d cursor here that means if I transform rotate scale you can see that it will use this position here and then I was basically just scaling this up s by 100 then certainly all the modifiers need to be applied so for example they stand on a yarn had some modifiers on it then with ctrl a you apply the scale so that blender knows that this is the new standard scale of all these objects then you boolean everything together and after this you scale this down by scale 0.01 and then you're back at the original scale and then with control a you apply the scale again and then everything should work if you have other sculpting problems check out my other video which is fully dedicated to solving these power link in the video description so this was my more or less finished dragon with everything bullying together that means this is now one big object and the volume is also one so nothing is intersecting anymore everything is really cut into each other so then he told me for 3d printing it's not so nice to have this big overhanging parts like the wings here and also the head could be a bit difficult so what he told me is that I should cut the head here somewhere and also the wings here and here so let me show you how I did this I created this weird looking thing if I the same the subsurf modifier you can see this adjust weirdly deformed shapes which are basically covering the wings and the head fully in its volume and one specific thing I did if I disabled the dragon for a second you can see that inside the cutting area basically I have this little extrusion which later on is really important so that you can after a 3d printing stick the dragon together and with some glue of this will even be more fixed so that this works same thing over here for the head and this things I cut off using for example the intersect mode and then I had the head and the wings separate but make sure to duplicate the dragon first because otherwise you will lose the dragon's body because then you have to do it again with the difference option so that you have the body without the wings and the head so and this was the final thing I had so if I have for example select the wing here you can see if I pull it out this is how it looks like same thing for the head you can see we have this holes in here right now also on the head here and for the wings so then I sent this to Danny so that he can check this out if it worked for 3d printing and the only thing he mentioned is that the resolution is still too high because here I still have several millions of polygons so I added a DC made modifier which used the resolution quite a lot so just turn down the ratio until you have the resolution you want and the same thing I did for the wings and the head and after this I selected one part go to file export and exported this as STL and down here I choose selection only and then I exported each part individual in one file each so we don't have this large file and it seems that this was better for 3d printing yea and for all the people who just want to create an epic presentation of your sculpting check out my previous video where I show you how to create this nice autofocus effect in blender 2.8 evie so this is a really nice way to present your Scouting's link in the video description yea and for all the people that are interested in the material I created here as you can see this is really simple so the first thing I did I wanted to intensify all the details here and for this I usually would use a point in this feature but this is only working in cycles so what I did I selected the dragon went over to a vertex paint mode basically a way to just color all the vertices of the mesh and since we have a high dense mesh we have a lot of vertices to color and so what I did and let's switch over to the solid viewport shading enable overlays because otherwise we don't see the vertex paint and then I go to paint and click on dirt vertex color and then we have this kind of ambient occlusion effect which is painted all over the place and this is really stored inside the vertex data and then we can go back to object mode then let's go back to the rendered view and if we take a look in the object data panel we have the vertex colors and you can see this new color I created this kind of ambient occlusion effect is called coal and all you need to do right now in the material is to add an import attribute and then type in coal or if you have the node Wrangler add-on enabled you can also edit under import vertex color and just click on here then you have basically the same thing so and as you can see this Oh here I used to create this kind of shadow effect so first thing I did I put this attribute node with the vertex color information into a dark green and a light green color ramp to get this color which is basically the main thing then since down here I had just a few polygons you can see we have some not so nice looking effects and I didn't want to remesh the whole thing so what I did I was creating a simple gradient with a mapping node I'd changed the rotation and position so that I basically cover the lower part here and then with a mix node I mixed a dark green color over this so we don't see this ugly artifacts and this was basically my final color and the second thing I did I was creating a very simple roughness map also based on the vertex color so I had this one here and then was a simple noise texture and the color ramp I had this color here and then I mix both together then I had something like this and now I plug this into the roughness value of the principal shader and this basically means that all the dark areas will be a little bit more glossy and all the bright areas will be relatively rough so there's less reflection and with this simple effect you have this nice glossy effects then looks like we have some kind of vanishing above the surface I don't know but somehow it looks really cool so and as you can see this is a super simple setup and if you don't have this weird artifacts down here you basically can fully ignore all this stuff up here and just use this set up over here yeah and the very cool thing here is that we can easily change the color with this color ramp here so let's pick this handle and click down here and then let's make a fire dragon yeah something like this probably the simple setup in the world yeah guys this was a pretty long video let me know in the comments below if you made it through the whole video and especially let me know what of all the tips you maybe learned was the best thing for you yeah guys don't forget to grab the 30% off for my master in sculpting course and don't forget to my free blender sculpting sheet sheet and by the way this was probably my last video with blender 2.79 I'm not entirely sure but in the next couple of days / weeks blender 2.8 the first beta version will be released and I think this is a point where we slowly can start to make real video tutorials about blender 2.8 so yeah expect more blender 2.8 stuff and by the way if you use blender a lot and especially if you use planner professionally there's a really cool way to support the language development so if you want to speed up things for blender if you want to help to improve blender then check out fun dot blender.org there you find all further information yeah and if you enjoyed this video give it a like if you love this video share it with your friends and subscribe to my channel wing the Bell if you don't want to miss any future content that's it guys see you in the next video goodbye [Music] [Music]

Channel: CG Boost

Views: 267,609

Keywords: character creation blender, dragon sculpting, 3d printing, blender sculpting tips, dragon design, dragon modeling blender, fantasy, blender 2.8 tutorial, blender 2.8 sculpting for beginners, blender sculpting, blender 2.8 viewport, blender 2.8 sculpting, blender dragon sculpting, blender creature sculpting, create creatures for 3d printing, 3d printing preparation blender, blender tutorial, 3d printed tabletop, procedural materials blender

Id: j9LsMosCnZE

Length: 55min 24sec (3324 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 23 2018