Smoog the Dragon

After about a year of on-and-off work, I'm happy to say this project is finally done. Work started late last September with concepting and reference gathering. The sculpting, retopology, and texturing of the head soon followed, with work concluding around November. In order to deal with the high polycount need for this level of detail all over the body, I split it into 4 different pieces: The head, the torso, the wings, and the hindquarters. Due to the performance limitations of my preferred software, work on the torso was rough, and it took considerably longer than the rest of his body, and almost burned me out on the whole project. The wings were finished quite quickly after that, in just a week or two, and just about a week ago the legs were finally completed. Smoog is based on reference from quite a few different animals, the mains ones being crocodiles, horned lizards, and (obviously) bats and birds. Additionally, his eyes, made in Substance Designer are directly modeled after Tokay geckos, which I chose for their strange, almost alien seeming quadripartite pupils and beautiful eye patterns. Special thanks to my former college professors for providing feedback on this and other (much worse) creature models I have made in the past.