| Inspiration
My inspiration for this scene was quite simple. I am a big fan of the fantasy genre, so I wanted to do something related to that. I decided to do a scene about the creation of the world. I had an idea of god creating the world and the first creature he created. Of course a dragon came to mind because dragons are very cool to me. In this scene, we can see God's hand, as a physical representation of His will, creating the world and his first child, the Eternal Dragon, is there to witness it all. I originally wanted to add and arm and a sleeve, but that didn't work out. Instead we just see a semi-ethereal hand, which might have worked out better anyways.
Art
I have to admit that the art that was involved in this scene was not completely to my satisfaction. I originally went with a blue dragon, but that didn't work well with the background at all. I played around with the colors and finally tried a mix of greens for the dragon. That mixed well with the blue earth and dark background. I'm still not too satisfied with the background, because it never seemed really 3-D to me, but that probably has more to do with the technical part.
Technical
I used a lot of tools and techniques for this scene. For modeling I used the drag, magnet, box, sub-patch, rail extrude, rail clone, mirror, and many others I can't remember to create the objects. Most of the work was done with the sub-patch tool and just moving points around. The most important technique to use is the sub-patch tool, then moving points around using the control points. After getting the right shape, I would switch over to layout and test the model out. Then I could switch back to make any corrections. For the spinal ridges on the dragon, the rail clone tool was most convenient. It even rotated the clones so that they would line up. It took some experimenting but I finally got the right number of spikes.
For texturing, I used a tutorial I found on the web for the Earth. It helped me create a realistic atmosphere and clouds. It involved layering many textures using procedural, gradient, and image mapping. It involved setting the refraction angles, which I still don't understand much.
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![](javascript:launchRemote("../../../../../album/CSCI140/Final_Scenes/ChaLee1.jpg"))
