Assignment #5

Small Dragon

Small Dragon from Marcy Elliott on Vimeo.

This project was particularly frustrating for me.....my first attempt at a 3D Dragon wound up looking more like a 3D pencil. So then I started over.... I decided to model each individual part of the dragon in Google SketchUp. Then I had to export each individual model into Photoshop and save it as a psd. My first problem occured here: the tail would not retain any of the colors or textures that I used in Google SketchUp. I tried to fix this problem by re-modeling the tail 3 times, and exporting it in a variety of ways, but I never actually figured out what was wrong. So I decided that the dragon looks better with a gray tail. After saving each model as a psd, I imported the files into AfterEffects. The plan was to create snakelike a path using the head of the dragon, to orient the head to the path that I created, then to parent each individual body piece to follow the head, and rotate each piece in turn. However, when I tried to parent the body piece to the head, it jumped all over the place. I decided it might just be easier to move the piece manually. That took a really long time... So i decided that my Dragon should actually just be a baby dragon this time. Hope you enjoy!