The new character, a dragon (Patreon)

After I got the new head made it was time to weight paint it to the facial bones. The smart thing about using bones for facial expressions is that you don’t have to make them all again, compared to shape keys that need to be remade every time the character mesh is modified. The resting location of the bones had to be changed of course, to match the head and a tiny bit of the eye animation needed a change, everything else for the face worked.

The vertex groups that are used for the cloth simulation needed some edits to work again after changes to the mesh. I also added pointy ears, it kind of looked like something was missing, especially when the character doesn’t have many horns x).

With the model pretty much done, I saved a high and a low poly version of the model, this is so substance painter can bake the high-res mesh onto the low-res mesh. It also bake a bunch of other mesh maps which the program can use for materials, masks and painting.

For the texture, I looked at references of reptiles and other anthro dragons, I ended up not making the character too bumpy. I think a soft and “rubbery” skin like look fits well when the character is going to be fat, and to make it simple and stable when the character uses clothing. As for the color, I went with a sandy orange with a warmer yellow belly/underside.

When I paint the character, I prefer to split it into parts like the nails, horns and mouth. It makes it much easier to paint, especially the mouth, though the tongue is still a bit difficult to paint since it’s in an enclosed space.

I also made a fat skin bump map, the previous solution I wrote about didn’t work well when there is no hair present. The UV seams was extremely visible by using the solution.

Fortunately, substance painter have a Voronoi texture generator that has pretty much the same settings as it does in blender, the same settings could more or less be used. I also made the same bumpy texture map for the wolf character.

The seams that was visible before are pretty much gone now. :D