Red (draco rufus) by theSea

Vue • Fantasy • posted on Dec 14, 2010

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Description

Hi, thanks for looking in. This is basically a materials study. I was looking to incorporate a red dragon into another piece I'm working on and really wanted him to look good.. so I did a separate study of the dragon in isolation. As with such things, I ended up pushing this to a more or less "finished" state because I thought it looked nice. This is the DAZ Millennium Dragon 2 with Swidhelm's awesome Mil Dragon wings available here. The terrain is an infinite procedural and the atmosphere was put together pretty quickly. I was really drawn to the color contrast between the blue background and the red dragon. As this was a materials study I used one of the canned Mil Dragon 2 poses - Swidhelm provides prop wing membranes for these so you don't have to go to the cloth room in Poser which is nice for a quick and dirty piece like this. Texture is the red texture from the Mil Dragon 1 texture pack. It stands up pretty well except for the atrocious bump maps. I set most of the scale textures up with displacement and added layers of gloss or varnish over everything except the wings to give a fresnel reflective property. If you play with the alpha strength on the varnish layer you can get some subtle reflective effects. Image was rendered in Vue 9i using global radiosity with fairly low quality settings in just over four hours. Postwork included some exposure adjustment and color tweaking.. plus titles. All in all a fun little diversion. We'll see if the dragon pops up in the other image or not :) As always your comments and critique are appreciated. Have a great holiday season!

Production Credits

Swidhelm's Mill Wings

By Swidhelm

$8.00 USD 50% Off

$4.00 USD

Comments (19)

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SBriggs

1:13PM | Tue, 14 December 2010

There's a very nice sense of depth in this and I like the slightly tilted POV! It adds to the feeling of actually being up there with Rufus!!

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fivecat

1:19PM | Tue, 14 December 2010

I love your descriptions as to how you arrived at your (always) beautiful images. You pay interest not to just composition but also to lighting and color.

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texboy

1:33PM | Tue, 14 December 2010

looks grand! thanks for all the tech details, too!!

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PhilW

1:50PM | Tue, 14 December 2010

Great dragon textures and as you say, it works really well against this background!

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dragonmuse

1:51PM | Tue, 14 December 2010

I was surprised that you used the DAZ maps. I find they tend to distort. I have played with bump maps and displacement on them too, but not with this kind of result.. the scales are wonderfully done. I shall have to see what I can do next time :) I think personally though, I would make the membranes a little translucent and perhaps less "scaley". But that is just personal taste. Your treatment is interesting too. Overall, I think he is beautiful. The background is wonderful too.. very desolate and cold. A very nice contrast to the dragon.

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bigbraader

2:10PM | Tue, 14 December 2010

Excellent materials.

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Seaview123

2:27PM | Tue, 14 December 2010

Cool looking dragon! Nice work!

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alessimarco

2:52PM | Tue, 14 December 2010

~Fantastic work!~

Tugpsx

3:21PM | Tue, 14 December 2010

Very well done. Good to know the Daz materials will work in Vue9. Thanks for sharing.

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scifibabe

8:13PM | Tue, 14 December 2010

Very pretty dragon pic. Love the outstretched wings and sky. Very nice.

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kobaltkween

2:40AM | Wed, 15 December 2010

i find it interesting that even though the the textures are very clear and precise, and the highlights on the tail make it obviously 3D, something about the shading and textures makes it look almost drawn to me. especially the membranes on the wings. it's a great pose, and the very slight greenish tinge to the mist behind him helps the image pop. the negative space is as interesting as the positive, and the wings work well as diagonals to bring your eyes right to him. he's also nicely off-center. even though it's a simple piece, it's very well done.

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