Dragon Egg Thief (CLOSED) (CLOSED)

Hello everyone!
I present you my submission for the Dragon contest, my work is called Dragon Egg Thief (featured as the first image). All models were done by me, I didn't use any assets.

Inspired by the grace of Chinese dragons, I opted for a wingless interpretation and skinny long body. Also I'm in love with Balinese traditions and especially Barong mythological creature with its distinctive shape of teeth and big eyes. 
The story is about a boy thief who stole fireflies of the forest spirits (black creatures flying around) and tries to steal dragon's eggs. My aim was to ensure the storyline is easily readable at the first glance. I used Chinese letters which were supposed to be an onomatopoeia for lion's roar sound to give it a link to the comics culture.

I've stylized everything, trying to enhance some angular square shapes. Regarding colors, I chose a high contrast bright palette with emissive elements.



Now, let me walk you through how I put it all together, the work took me a month approximately
Started with gathering a reference board and sketched a concept art in Photoshop. 



Then, I blocked out main characters and started to add details to change the shape to a more natural and beautiful version, making sure everything looked good from every angle. Environmental objects were added as well.
Once I got the high-poly version sorted, I had to do some retopology for the UV unwrapping and texturing. After texturing, I set up materials, added in some smoke and saliva. Got the cameras in place, sorted the focal distance. And then, it was render time!




I rendered a few images and one 360 degrees animation (which took me 200 frames, about 14 hours of render). 




Thanks everyone for reading!

This is Fantastic ! All that clever idea of putting onomatopoeia and Chinese letters and the composition all together. Must have taken you some time to set this idea forward. Your animated stages of work in the form of gif is an another plus.
Your video is outstanding, you could see your work as if it was printed in 3d (giving your last video some background music might've have been more inspirational - I guess you didn't choose to do this as the video was too short).
Bali has colorful hand prints of clothes and other hand paintings that may have similarity to Chinese paintings or inspirations.

I wish you good luck with a Balinese cat    =.= 

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Well done and good luck!

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