Phoenix Feng- Dragon Trainer
A downloadable asset pack
Higher resolution screenshots on Artstation
Feng is someone who has been around dragons all her life because her mother is part of the Phoenix Guard. Caring for the Emperor’s mystical pets is just the challenge for this plucky young girl. And because of her natural affinity working with dragons, she’s been tasked with the job of safely hatching one of the Emperor's dragon eggs!
Introduction
I knew I wanted to do a magical character, but something a bit different to the European fantasy route. Beast tamer was the initial low-level role I chose because it felt interesting to work with. I started researching different creatures, real and otherwise.
With an open brief like this, I like to start building up a story around the character and that starts with research and defining the world they inhabit. The Temeraire book series was my next port of call. The main character in it travels to the East with his dragon, so I built my concept around the existence of such legendary creatures by looking at other reference points.
I researched dragons in concept art and popular media to get an idea for my moodboard. I looked at films such as Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. Warm colours such as red consistently come to mind when thinking about dragons and in Chinese architecture it’s also seen as a symbol of good fortune.
From all this, Feng was born! My aim was to create something simple, fun and stylised from this idea.
Project summary
I gave myself two weeks to make Feng- I often find myself more productive under jam conditions. One week was spent on idea generation and concepts, and the other on everything else. The time constraints forced me to consider a more efficient workflow, so there are definitely things to be improved on in all areas.
If I were to remake her, I would spend more time on the sculpting and refining phase. I feel like I’m still getting to grips with 3D. The initial blockouts were rough, and it impacted my retopology and final model. On reflection, I could have made better use of Z-spheres. Shoes have always been one of my weak points too and they would have benefitted from a high-poly bake, a step I completely skipped. However, I was aiming to be under 15000 tris for this character and my final model was 14230 which I’m happy with.
With more time, I would’ve liked to polish a high-poly model to catch some of that lighting and details my textures are missing. Parts of the also model deformed oddly when posed, so there are some tweaks that could be made in the topology there. I feel like I could’ve been more ambitious with the poses but I am satisfied with how the renders came out.
That being said, I feel like I learned a great deal about the strong and weak points of my methods. The research and concept art really made things easier later on, especially in the texturing stage, but I think I spent too long in my comfort zone of 2D, caught up in concepting and presentation, which didn’t leave quite enough time to polish the rest of the project. From this experience, I know now which areas I need focus my efforts on to improve.
Overall I am pleased with the final result for this project. Feng meets the playful style goal I was aiming for, I finished her within the set time frame and she is a step closer to where I want to be as an artist from my previous characters. And last but not least, I really enjoyed working on it!
Download
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.