I don't think I made the ridges in Darius' horns distinct enough during his first iteration. More importantly, I was torn on how to handle thin sheets like his script. Giving them different textures/colours on both sides means making them more than just flat planes - extra tris AND potential PS1 jiggle issues.

But as always, there ended up being bigger fish to fry - namely extreme elbow/wrist twisting and my eternally poor grasp of colour theory.

And I thought shading Astor and Alban was difficult.

Darius' hues border the exact blue part of the colour wheel and they're washed out enough to start looking purple. It feels like I've made a mess of his vert colours juggling saturation and hues making things look warmer or cooler. Sometimes greens made better highlights, other times leaning towards blue/purple did...only real constant was that saturation or lack thereof can do so, so much for just a single hue.

I may need to consider making actual palettes in the future. Winging it is never a good idea 99% of the time despite my insistence on doing exactly that, but whenever I look at the dragons' vanilla textures, I fixate on the way the hue and saturation shift across the body and I end up hesitant out of fear of inaccuracy.

Like whoopdeedoo, I'm actually keeping colours saved in Blender palettes and using vert colours on squares as cheatsheets for tails nowadays.

This is gonna be a long one!

Compared to a lot of dragons in the game, Oswin arguably looks a bit bland.

But on the technical side of things, I think he's by far one of THE most intriguing dragons since he's one of the five base dragons and was originally intended to be Nestor - I'll get to that in a bit, it's time to yammer about devamping him.

First and foremost: apologies for the delay, 2.79's resolution still refuses to cooperate.

And to think I considered the triangulation and twisting of Oswin's arms to be a major roadblock… All said and done, at least I can justify fixating on THAT. The same can't be said for my overfocus on reshading his turban.

Did I mention fretting over painting his snout and the war between making his vert colours appeal to me and replicating the highlights/shading on his vanilla model without adding too much extra geometry? Fucking cheeks, man. Those were fun. If I'd known they were gonna piss me off and metallicising his collar would be nowhere as difficult as I feared, I wouldn't have put it off until the end.

Also, there's a chance that Oswin's anims were SLIGHTLY borked when I extracted them. From what I've seen testing his vanilla model in Blender and comparing it with ingame footage, his teeth and lip bones may be acting up - so you might notice things looking a bit weird and clippy in that vid.

Ahem. Now it's time for the fun part.

when your lovable brute doesn't know his strength

The first feathered dragon! Alban's weights needed work (and still do), but his legs and tail fared better than I thought they would.

I need to remember to slap a screenie of his vanilla wings onto these ones and test how well they animate before I (eventually) move onto the texture phase.

The transition from warm hues at the top to cool towards the bottom did my head in when shading and so did whatever in the zebra-loving hell is going on with those horns. Alban's neck looks like it's got a stark shift in colour from one side of his scarf to the other and that collarbone-spanning stripe certainly doesn't make it easier for me to discern.

I feel like it'll be easier to nix the stripes until the texture phase (tried doing some of them one-sided, hated the results), but I left some on his head - it seemed kinda bare without them.

But those tail feathers…

Their weights are so out of sync with the tail's, even in vanilla. It cost a couple extra tris, but I replaced that slab with proper-ish geometry so it'll look somewhat presentable for the time being (and make it easier to reweight).

a young Mr. Dubois (second attempt)