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We will not have Live Answer Time on Sat Nov 23. See You Next Week! Film star Boris Karloff was born on this day in 1887.

That was a terrific little film. Thanks for sharing...

Man, those were the days. Not a single piece of laminate or MDF in that office.

I mean, that's a nice desk. I wouldn't say no if I still had room for something like it.

Article about the Animator Desk and other specialized furniture created for the growing Disney Studio in the late 1930s. In Disney’s Golden Age, a Modernist Pioneer Designed the Perfect Animator’s Desk

The bones for this 'not a giraffe' are simply placed and not at all designed for precision. I added new child bones on the fly as new parts of the model were added. A functional rig which makes me want to investigate more that gap between such simple functioning rigs and what might replace it later as a more fully articulated rig if the simple model were upgraded to a highly detailed one. The jaw bone in particular was an attempt to just get a little bit of movement to those areas to hint that there was an actual mouth there. There is something I really like about this doodling approach to designing a character in that while working through it I start to see those things that would need to be updated and replaced. If diving into the more detailed and final model a lot of time encountering errors would make that a frustrating experience. As opposed to this approach which to me feels more like drawing and sketching ideas. Not as fast as drawing but with the benefit of actually having a working model as opposed to ideas on paper that still need to be implemented.

So much that could be changed! Regrets? I do wish I had used more cross sections when lathing the neck as it would allow for better placement of his differently colored belly. His mane/back scales need more detail/definition. Perhaps a sense of bones/webbing. Mouth. Need mouth. Nostrils. If the entire eyes were patch images or decals I probably could get away with more there and have better control of the look/feel. Why do I always resist just modeling the stuff in the first place? I wanted to have his horns be more turned but perhaps for this guy these are the best? More ornate horns might be reserved for other dragons this guy would encounter. Some additional deformation/detail and the cheeks and chin would suggest scales/hair. Ears... not very subject to gravity in this iteration. Those might be some of the obvious areas to work on. What else?

I was lathing a shape and thought I could easily turn it into a giraffe's head... A few hours later this dragon thingy appeared: The motion blur... a bit thick no? I thought I'd be lazy and make the eyelids be patch images that turn on/off. That was probably more work than it should have been if I would have just made actual eyelids. It kinda worked though. Had fun with a few things that won't be particularly apparent such as having the color of the horns change so that the lightest/grayest horn is always in the back (presumably aiding in giving a sense of depth). This guy technically has no mouth although he does have a jaw bone. He really needs a mouth. I was going for flat shaded and almost got what I was after. I need to explore that more and get that approach into muscle memory. He needs a body no? I thought about faking the reason for not having one by adding ripples of blue to indicate water. Added: Definitely needs eyebrows! It was a fun 3D exploration that reminds me that when doodling especially... there is always something more to tweak!

Robert asked me to post a shaded wireframe of the rig in action. It's not a brilliant rigging attempt, and it required a lot of muscle mode tweaking to get it to where it is. It's not really rigged to be animated so much as to get it into the smile position and render it. Sequence 01_2.mp4

Cheers David. Honestly probably not gonna work on it any further. The point was to get it featured on that stream thing and that's not gonna happen. So not gonna spend more time on it.

Keep tweaking it, you'll be surprised what small changes can do. The modeling looks solid...I haven't seen a picture of your subject, but what you have is really good splineage. Not a big deal, but pushing some CP's around on the inside of the ears could be something to look at. Just listen to constructive critiques (and throw away anything you don't agree with), saying something is bad or "gives them the creeps" doesn't mean anything...there are a lot of trolls.

I think I have SSS turned on. I'm just grateful for someone saying something positive about it. I posted it on the discord fan-art submissions thread and the only comments it garnered were "that's cool but the teeth are giving me the creeps" and "That's not horrifying at all" obviously implying that it is in fact horrifying. It also seems to have the dubious honour of being the only submission on there to get a frowny face reaction emoji.

Definitely not a waste of time. I'm not sure how far you want to tweak it, but it has all the makings of something great. Like Robert suggested, a hair shader might help get it farther along. Also, I would suggest a slight change in lighting...if you haven't already, try changing your light to Z-buffered shadows (hair reacts better) with a slightly bumped up Map Resolution of around 2048 and use a Rembrandt lighting setup. Then, you can add a normal map, bump map, displacement map or combinations of the three for the skin texture to add pores, etc. Some specular in the eyes and a slight specular on the skin (I would recommend using maps for that as some parts of the face tend to be more oily than others) and then a slight SSS on the teeth (you'll have to experiment there but a start would be .45, .40, .35), and skin (1.9, 1.2, 1.0 for the skin) . I'll add some MuHair settings to try in the attached image. Hope that helps.

Disney Shows some behind-the-scenes of his upcoming "Sleeping Beauty" in the guise of an art lesson.

No, I don't think that was a waste of time. That is a well-crafted face with a lively expression. That's not easy to do. Am i seeing some SSS on the skin? I presume styling the hair was time-consuming, as hair does not just fall into place like that.

Cheers Robert, I'll check that out for my next hair experiments.

Update: Occasionally, the None-None version above will render like this, which is a pretty good look. But it doesn't always do that... i'm not sure why.

The MuhHair and Kajiya-Kay plugin shaders work to make Particle Hair look better by re-shaping the Diffuse and Specular response of their surfaces. Kajiya-Kay is the easier one since it has no parameters of its own, it's just ON or not. However, unlike MuhHair, that lets you fine-tune the placement of highlights on the hair, Kajiya-Kay requires you to carefully place your specular light source... as you would in real life lighting. Here is hair with no extra shader and Specular Intensity 0 in the surface properties. Same hair, but with Specular Intensity greater than 0. The renderer seems to regard the hair as one simple mass and paints the specular highlight on top of that. Same hair but with Kajiya-Kay. A more individual-strand appearance to the specular highlights. Note that for ANY material using a plugin shader, you must Set Plugin Shaders ON in your Render Options. And for this particular PRJ you must set Options>Rendering>Use Settings from> The Camera. KajiyaKayTest007.prj

I did try Muhair at one point but it didn't look to make any difference when I rendered it and it was taking so long to render each pass that I didn't bother to faff with the settings. To be totally honest, this whole endeavour has probably been a massive waste of time and effort and most certainly won't yield any measurable results. But I will make a note to look into muhair settings and the kajiya-kay shaders for the next time I try doing hair. Cheers.

Do you have a shader on the hair? You could get appealing highlights with the Mu-hair or Kajiya-Kay (easier) shaders

No, nobody I know. It's another Minecraft YouTuber with a lot more of a following than I have. She streams on Twitch.tv and has a fanart showcase at the beginning of her streams. Submitted the pic to see if I can get it on there. Hopefully, a few of her over 1 million followers look up Voxel Tales and find the channel.

Yay! Is it anyone you know?

The Model is done. Took about 30 hours to render (I assume because I set the hair to be human hair width) Unless I have a very good reason or get a more powerful PC I doubt I'll ever render it again.

wow.....neat configurations!