Fire and Fangs | VR Sculpting for Everbound

Hello, there! In this week’s video we will dive into the next beast to be created for the world of Relias, the dragon! A very traditional, fire breathing beast, the dragon was once a proud, grand creature. During the time period in which Everbound takes place, the dragons have been captured and subjugated, used by Emperor Talia’s regime for a valuable resource they produce. I spent this video sculpting out the head of the creature, featuring large, prominent horns and a long snout. This, like the Leviathan, was sculpted in Medium, a VR sculpting program currently owned by Adobe. I do really enjoy working with this program, despite a few setbacks in functionality that really aren’t that consequential.

I started by wireframing out the head shape, focusing on the most significant structures that I wanted in the face. Large cheekbones and prominent jowls, a long snout with a beaked end, and a rounded, narrow head with curved horns. I wanted the horns to feel kind of ram-like, but with forward points to feel more menacing. I think there are some things about the design, as it sits, that look a bit too soft and narrow. It was mentioned during the stream that it may be better to widen the head a bit, and I think I am coming around to that idea. I did take Kory’s recommendation and made the brow a bit more prominent which I think helped quite a bit with the intensity of the neutral expression.

Smoothing the features out was a bit of a challenge due to the aforementioned shortcomings with Medium, but as long as I can get the shape fairly close to what I want, the smoothing tool is able to take away the minor imperfections on the surface. Mostly, that was accomplished by filling out the sections between the wireframe with sweeping shapes using a capsule-shaped clay tool that works basically like rolling paint in 3 dimensions. That left a sort of ribbed texture on the horns that I decided I really liked, and I have gone ahead and incorporated that into the final design. It did need to be redone though, the ridges as they appeared during the rough sculpt did not have enough consistency.

Before the next art video, I am going to polish up the horns and add some teeth, and affix the head to the body, wings and all. I am looking forward to sharing that with you. That’s all for today, but I hope you check out the video, and stay with us over in the streams, to see what happens next in the development of Everbound! Thank you for reading, it’s been a blast! See you in the next one.