Not a giraffe

[Rodney]

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!

[Rodney]

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?

[Rodney]

 

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.