Splinterlands Art Contest - Dragon Whelp!

Since I couldn't play all day I decided to work on something for the Splinterlands art contest!

I'm going to be building some dragons for Titan Climber so I thought this might be good practice too. So I built and animated a Dragon Whelp in Blender.

I started by building a model using mirror and manually extruding/adjusting points for the base model. For the dragons in my game, not sure they'll be this small but I thought it'd be fun to do a whelp for the contest and some practice.

With the base model shaping up it was time to start adding details. The Dragon Whelp card has little spikes down its back and a noticeable lower jaw. It also has a bigger upper eye brow.

With the model done it was time to unwrap the UVs. This is what allows us to paint on the model basically. Blender's unwrap tool makes this relatively easy but there is almost always some annoying manual work to be done. Since the colors are pretty basic I decided to just overlap a bunch.

When it comes to textures I use Krita to paint. So with it unwrapped I saved out the UV image and started painting the base colors.

I didn't want to get too crazy with the textures but I didn't think the base colors were enough. So I did a little airbrushing to get the main details done. Think it turned out pretty well!

At this point I thought it was looking pretty good but a little stiff! So I added bones and sort of rigged it for animation. Setting up the bones went pretty well since it is a relatively simple model.

After the skinning process it was ready to animate. I decided to do a idle flying animation. And make my final image be an animated GIF.

And viola! We have a flying Dragon Whelp!

To produce the animated GIF was a bit tricky. I rendered out transparent PNGs, the animation is 80 frames long. Then I used imagemagick to put it together as an animated GIF on the command line.

Hope you all like it!