Reference Material/Sketches

When creating a model there are many ways to start, you can use some reference images you have around or you find on the net (our Dragon for example), you can do the sketches by yourself (Elementals, Ghost, Naga, Efreet, Troll), you can mix these methods (Griffon) or you can just start modeling (Basilisk, Hydra)

This is how the Dragon started...

NOTE: this images come from various "Dungeons and Dragons" books and are created by Todd Lockwood and Ron Spencer

Modeling

... and this is the result of the modeling process starting from a Cube Polygon Mesh in XSI

Rigging

Next step to arrive at the final result is the rigging (the creation of the Skeleton, ie the control that later on will help the animation of the model). Fortunately for us, XSI can really help us much here by providing a "Quadruped Guide" that contains the basic setup for a quadruped creature that can be moved around and adapted to our model. Something is still missing though: the wings! Unfortunately this has to be done by ourselves. One small limitation to keep in mind: XNA can only use at most 58 bones which in our case was surpassed with the wings. We solved the problem by removing some other less important bones (for us).

Next step in the rigging process is the weighting of the vertices on the mesh. Again XSI helps a lot by assigning the vertices to the X closest bones. Obviously this is not sufficient but it really saves a lot of work. In our case we only needed to change the weighting on the joints and remove the influences of some bones where not appropriated (like the bones of one leg influencing the mesh of the other).

Animation

As soon as we rigged and we're happy with the weighting we can start animating the Dragon. As all other models we created, this step was done by keyframing. Note that this is a difficult step and may need some research to understand some of the movements (obviously since dragons like this don't exist in nature, you have to find other animals that have a similar structure, in this case Bats have the same type of wings).

Texturing

We skipped this step because of lack of time and we felt that the rest was most important to give a feeling of the creature.