Model the character-part1 Head

Introduction
I divide the process into two parts,the basic modelling design and animation design.

I.Character modelling

In this part I will create the head and the body separately, because the characteristic part will concentrate on the head,so it will take more time to create the head, and I will create this character's body based on the man's body.

II.Design animation
In the animation part, firstly, I am going to show how to set bone to this character, and then on the second part I will design the animation.

Head
Now I am going to start create the head part.before doing this I have seen some of the tutorials that they often create the head modelling by through changing a basic head modelling. I think it is a good way which can save a lot of time to recreate the basic head and directly jump to do the design process.

This basic head modelling comes from part of my independ learning module.the like of the blog is: http://3dh-ruiding.blogspot.com/, I record all the process of creating the head.

Firstly, save the head modelling as a new 3D file called dragon king.
with the dragon's characteristic in mind. there I will adjust the mouth ,nose and ears on the modelling and add the horns ,feelers and beard ect.

I.Extend the head

As we can see, the dragon have a very long mouth and a big nose, so I will extend the mouth and nose together to build the basic shape of the mouth and nose parts.select all the vertexes on thenose and mouth parts, and move them to the left on the left view.

then cut sveral new edges on the extended part, there is no rule how many lines should be cut. the aim of doing this is just for making the extended part more physically.

next extend the head on the horizontal direction, especially the nose.

I try a lot of time to extend my head modelling, In my opinion, do not fear to make the basic horrible, the more times you change it, more closer to your ideal modelling.

now I have finished the basic expansion, next steps are adjusting detail part.extend the nose again to make it looks more stronger.

the ear I just drag a edge on the top of ear up to the right.make ears like wizards'.

and then connect a circle alone the edge of the ear.this is to create more vertixes to adjust.

2.Create the processes

2.1.horn

choose three faces on the top of head, and extrude them once.

then draw two lines on the left of view.one long, one short.

extrude the two faces inside along the long line, other face along the short one.

set the convenient value , 5 segmet is good enough for my character.

adjust the new part by cutting some lines on them. the way is where need to be adjust I will cut a line to add some vertexes.

pick one face on the horn on the left view and extrude it, repeat it on the right view, it is to create some bumps on the horn.

2.2.The eyebrow

go to the polygon level and extrudethe eyebrow part.

cut new line on the extrude face, and drag it to the front.

drag the face on the right corner up to the right.

2.3.the moustache and beard

I have created the the moustache and beard by the same time ,but I delete the beard, because it makes the whole character looks like a very old man, that goes against the design idea.

creating the moustache is the same to the eyebrow, the only difference is I use the Extrude along Spline to make the tail of the moustache.

adjust the shape, cut a line on the conection
add another line ont the top and delete the old one, and then drag the new line up.
cut a line on the buttom as well.

4. The feeler

The last part is the feeler, it is a special part on this character, but it is easy to create, just the same thing as the horn, but the important is draw a nice shape of line, so it can follow the shape.

set a segmet velue for the feeler.

I will create a same one on the forehead, but it is part of the hair, not a feeler.

by now the basic head modelling has been done.but it took more time to fix it, because it is changed on other modelling, there are a lot of mistake comes out when it is rebuilt.

next blog I am going to build the body part, then I can connect it with the body.

A character design idea from Chinese dragon

This character I call it Dragon king, which is created based on the Chinese traditional dragon, there are thousand years history about dragon in China, and it is a holy creature, people respect it, and they thought dragon was living in the heaven, so all the kings in old China were called the son of dragon, who come from heaven and were sent to earth to lead this country, so today there are a lot of dragon rilievo on the surface of old palace building.
Why call it Chinese traditional dragon, because there are a lot of differences between Chinese and western dragon, there are two pictures below to compare with the Chinese dragon and the western dragon in the fairy tale. Chinese style dragon

western style dragon

As we can see, a big difference is Chinese dragon does not have a pair of wings. And the shape of the body is quite like a snake, the head horn is different as well, specially, there a pair of long feeler beside the nose.

I think those differences come into being the different culture.
Because Chinese thought the dragon was a holy animal so it should have characteristic of all the animals, some thing like beer’s horn, snake’s body, eagle’s claw and the feeler of the fish and so on.

So those characteristic of Chinese dragon will be kept on my character, however, this character is the dragon who changed to be a human, so I will add more human characteristic, and make it more like a human, for example, change the grisly countenance to be more human .

This old Chinese sculpture is a example that dragon who chages to be a human.I take it as a referance while I create my character.