CREATE A MECHANICAL DRAGON IN VR
AUTHOR
Glen Southern
Glen runs SouthernGFX, a small Cheshire-based studio specialising in character and creature design. He’s been using and training ZBrush in the UK for over 18 years and is a Wacom Ambassador for the UK and Ireland.
Did you ever want to make dragons and robots when you were a kid? Did you watch movies like Tron, and more recently Ready Player One, and want to be in a virtual world where you can actually do that sort of stuff? Well, welcome to the future, and this tutorial and series of videos are going to get you off to a good start. Using an innovative piece of software called Gravity Sketch on an Oculus Rift VR rig we will take a look at how to design and build a mechanical dragon. The model will be made in such a way that it can be exported and used in other programs either as a reference or for further modelling and rendering in other programs.
In this tutorial we will take a look at Gravity Sketch, which is much more of a design tool than a sculpting program. That means it is more suited to mechanical modelling for things like cars and industrial products than it is to faces or creatures. It is a splinebased (NURBS) package and that means the end result can be used in programs like Rhino and Fusion 360. But we aren’t limited to that sort of design, and we can show that here by designing and building a robot dragon and then rendering it out in a full environment.
01 SKETCH THE DRAGON
The first step to this
