Megan Bednarz

I evened out the horizon line and added an accent light on the hammer head. For some reason, I couldn’t get rid of the alpha channel, it kept recording it in the render. I call it done, though.

Here is the progress of my lighting…. I have grouped the previous posts into one.

Here you can see the rubber ducky and the dragon placed in the scene! I also decided to modify the swirls around the hammer. I added another flowing shape which was a revolve of a wavy curve to create that outpouring of water on the steps. Notice I also turned the dragon’s head and raised it up a little, so it could actually weave in between the columns. I decided I didn’t have enough time to add arms or legs (or wings) and since it was a water dragon, I really didn’t need to. I removed the column material as it was distracting. I also extended the base of the pedestal farther to the left to remove a lighter area in the water, which was disturbing to the image also.

I used a smooth operation on the polygon to refine it more. It worked like a charm! The only thing missing was eyes. I chamfered out a vertex on either side and performed the same extrude operation on the resulting diamond shape. On that I applied another smooth command, this time only to the selected faces (I selected both eyes). It rounded them pretty nicely, but I decided to go back and cut those faces a few more times to make an octogon instead of a diamond (not shown…I used the subdivide tool for that one). That worked much better.

Here’s where it got tricky. I wanted to mirror the rubber ducky, and extrude a piece for a head. The extruding went… NOT okay. It started extruding all the faces separately in their own directions!! I ended up just making all those faces into a single face by deleting the edges, and then refining it once I got it into shape.

As for mirroring, make sure to note that you do NOT want to merge the resulting meshes… or they won’t keep updating your mirror. When you  decide you are through with mirroring, then you can merge the two meshes, but make sure also to select all the way down the middle of the object where you mirrored it and merge those vertices.

Starting with a polygon sphere, I used a 3×3x3 lattice to tweak the surface to make it generally the shape of a rubber ducky. I decided to do this because it was much quicker than trying to individually tweak the vertices. I also couldn’t figure out how to use the soft selection tool, so this was my fallback option. I think it worked great! I just had to remember to DELETE HISTORY to get rid of the lattice when it was time to move on. At this point it was not mirrored, I just applied the same transforms to both sides.

Here is the dragon in its mostly finished state. I later ended up adding back ridges and horns on its head. I also added two NURBS spheres for eyes, and parented them to the main NURBS shape.

Well that short dragon wasn’t exactly what I wanted, so I selected all the CVs of the head and pulled them forward. I inserted isoparms between the ones at either side of the neck so I could continue to edit its curvature. Insert isoparms became a very useful tool, and I ended up repeating the procedure along the lateral lines of the surface. I selected two adjacent isoparms and set the # isoparms to insert to whatever I needed it to be.

It was difficult to select along the top ridge of the nose, because that’s where the boundaries of the surface were, so I think I ended up creating too many new isoparms on the nose. That worked to my advantage, though, when I decided to make spine ridges and a ridge on the snout.

To begin my NURBS dragon, I lofted together about 6 cross-sections which I had tweaked from a circle and copied to make sure they had the same number of curve points. I included intermediate isoparms to make it easier to edit in the future.

1) Extended the base of the pedestal into a shallow rise up to it. I used the extrude command again.

2) Used the duplicate with transform tool to copy my columns to a level below, on the flat grade of the slope I had just made. I tilted them at odd angles and shortened them to look eroded by simply moving/scaling/rotating the top vertices of the column.

3) For the capstone of each column which I modified in such a way, I moved it down to the lake-bed which was the aforementioned slope, and tilted it at an odd angle.