Happy New Year of the Dragon

Animation, Blog Post,

As the only mythical animal in the Chinese zodiac, the Dragon is seen as an auspicious, powerful and benevolent creature. In ancient China, only emperors were allowed to own images of dragons, as emperors were thought to be the sons of dragons, so these mythical creatures can be seen depicted throughout the Imperial buildings of the Forbidden City (though some don’t actually look like dragons)!

There is a Chinese idiom, made famous by a certain martial arts film made in 2000 – ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’. The saying refers to a situation when people are hiding their talents beneath an unassuming exterior. The moral of this, of course, is to never judge a person’s ability by their seemingly ordinary appearance because you don’t know what surprising skills they may be concealing.

February 10th 2024 begins the year of the Wood Dragon, the Wood element representing resilience. People born in the Year of the Dragon are considered to be natural leaders, confident, pioneering and energetic. So, be full of Dragon spirit this year – get out there and set the world on fire! Show us your hidden talents, but please remember to use yours wisely as not all skills are useful… or even safe!

Gung Hei Fat Choi!

Mo and Dave

If you’d like to know more about dragons, and how to draw them, head over to our friend MP Robertson’s Kickstarter page, where he’s hatching a plan to create a book called Drawing Dragons: www.bit.ly/drawingdragons

Halloween Ghost

Animation, Blog Post

All Hallows Eve, on October 31st, is when summer ends and the dark months begin. The boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead dissolve and, for one night only, ghosts of those departed return in search of what they left behind.

Happy Halloween and be sure to take all your valuables with you when you leave!

Dragon in the mist

3D, Character Design, creative fun
Fed up with sitting on treasure and, as there were no Hobbits around,
the dragon decided to take the morning off to goof around in the forest.

Over the past month or so I have been working through the GameDev.tv Blender sculpting course, using one of my own character designs.

The process was full of mistakes and re-tries, as my thin and spindly dragon design caused quite a few headaches that weren’t anticipated in the course.

To be fair, the tutorial states that the focus of the course is on sculpting and, by necessity, it skates over some of the techniques needed to get to the final posed render. That meant I had to poke around on the internet to solve some of the challenges my design created – not necessarily a bad thing from a learning point of view though!

And now in actual 3d…

I’ve uploaded it to Sketchfab, a platform for 3D and AR models (take a look, it’s fascinating!)

It was a great experience and a huge thrill to see one of my creatures come to life, especially when got a ‘staff pick’ on Sketchfab!

I must do more… once I’ve had a little lie down.

Photo Scanned rocks by Lassi Kaukonen at Sketchfab

Background HDRI from Poly Haven