That's undeniably fantastic work, Raxx; I look forward to seeing the end result, even more so if it's animated!
rellik420: My model is actually a composite. The head and body are 'built' as they appear (objects). The legs I decided to rig & pose in the scene, as it was the only sure way to get the toes on the ground. So I built one each of a left and right leg (and forgot to re-texture the toenails on the left leg before rendering! Darn local textures) and posed two of each in the scene.
Sorry if this takes up loads of space, but to answer questions, but I made the body in a very short space of time (<30 mins) in the following way:
Model a single Scale by point-editing a primitive cube (3,1,3) - Scale is 'tilted' forwards sufficiently to over/underlap with duplicates
Create a 12-sided n-gon as a guide
Duplicate and position 4 more Scales down one side of the n-gon (no care taken to be exact!) then mirror each in the x-plane
Create another Scale duplicate, then make it long by dragging the side points apart, then cut the elogated faces vertically several times, then apply a 90-deg bend modifier, with the object fitting exactly within the modifier length. Position this into the remaining gap in the Scale 'ring'. The n-gon guide can then be deleted
Group ALL the meshes, including the long (belly) Scale, copy and paste this, rotate 15-deg around the Z-axis to show inbetween the original Scale ring, then reposition along the Z-axis at an arbitrary seperation. Ungroup the new ring and DELETE the extra belly Scale as it was only included to keep the centre of the ring close to the world-centre when rotating the group. Mirror the odd number Scale in the new ring (in red)
Group EVERYTHING together, and copy, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste! until the 'tube' is a suitable length - I also added the back spines at this point, but they do not follow the scale duplication pattern, which helps avoid 'obvious' repeating in the pattern
Ungroup EVERYTHING then join it all together into a single, giant solid. Use a series of taper modifiers to almost close one end of the 'pipe' - I find several modifiers with a factor of 0.3 covering progressively more of the tube produce a much more natural result than one taper at 0.8. I also applied a subtle curvature (~0.1) and a very small twist (10-deg) to the entire body, again to increase subtle variation in the end result (not in picture)
And then it's just bend, bend, bend, bend. Modifiers get tricky as soon as an object starts 'almost' touching itself, but if you start from one end and keep a constant eye on what you're aiming for, it's usually possible.
So, apologies if I've bored everyone off to another website, but I hope that's of interest to some at least! I did consider rigging the whole body, but I'd need at least 100 bones for a decent result, and I just can't face setting the joint limits that many times. So I guess the 'wrinkle' is just an artifact of all the bending. There are a few other oddities on the body caused by the low poly Scales, but I don't think they do too much harm. Contrary to what's been said, I spent all my modelling time on the head, and had it looking exactly how I wanted, so body and feet were both a bit rushed.
), I was originally intending this to be a small statue, rather than a 'real' dragon (there's an oxymoron).