Other dragons, like Kinnara, you can imagine giving you a piggy back ride to work or helping you move. There’s some dragons that you see and you fully expect them to happily burn your house down before flying off into the sunset. Kinnara was our first attempt at a softer, friendlier dragon. To avoid this, we tried to pull inspiration from dragons across all types of lore. When we first started designing dragons for this game, we were keenly aware that if we stuck too closely to any one dragon archetype, all of our dragons would feel repetitive and boring.
Now that we’ve gone through the process of creating the dragons, I want to walk you through some of our other favorites in the game and where the concepts for their designs came from.Ībilities : Chain lightning, Summon Warrior, Storm Resist When we are happy with the final product, we take it to our playtesters. After we check that the colors and hues are appropriate to the silhouette, we begin rigging and animation. When his overall form had been created, we retopped the model and added texture, which added the fine details like his leafy wings and vine-esque complex. Once we had the general concept in mind, we went to Zbrush to create to begin sculpting Arborious. We then did several color passes to get a better idea of the color scheme we wanted to go with. Once we determined to go with the redwood and terrestrial look, we created our black and white rough silhouettes to determine the general shape we wanted Arborious to be. We wanted to find a way to tie that same feeling to a dragon and Arborius is what we came up with, so we started designing. Being based in San Francisco, this reminded us of the giant sturdy redwoods of Northern California: they’re ancient, powerful and permanent. He’s kind of like a big reptilian Ent.Īdditionally, Arborius is a warrior dragon which means he can take a lot of damage. When designing Arborius, we wanted to create a dragon whose ties to nature went past the color scheme, so we toyed around with a lot of different configurations of living trees, vines and leaves before deciding on Arborius' current look. When you first see Arborius, it’s very clear that he’s basically a giant tree that can fly and shoot fire. When the animation is complete, we submit the dragon to our playtesters, high five and move on to the next dragon! ArboriusĪbilities : Rejuvenate, Stoneskin Shield, Ballista Resist When we have the final model we go to rig and animation, which is usually a pretty smooth process as we use one of our five existing rigs and binding bones.
Once the full model has been created with textures, it’s time to ensure the brightness and hue choices create are appropriate for the look, and do final art fixes and color corrections. From here, we can really start getting down to the details by retopping the model adding textures - such as the scars and tears on his skin. At this point, Dactyl’s model has been fully formed, minus the textures and colors that will really set him apart. Using the program Zbrush, we then created a 3D sculpture of Dactyl, bringing our concept to life.
After playing with the concept and determining the general design, we moved on to some of the details that finesse Dactyl’s look - like his tattered wings and torn flesh. From here, we created several black and white rough drafts to quickly determine the silhouette we wanted. This drastically reduced our total design time and freed up our team to do work on some of the more fun parts of creating dragons.īack to Dactyl… to achieve Dactyl’s evil look, we looked to our rigs first to help guide any visual constraints. Using just a handful of rigs, we were able to design all of the dragons in the game. When we started creating War Dragons' look, we first built a few base skeletons that we call rigs. If Dactyl was a horsemen of the apocalypse, he’d be pestilence. We also gave him open wounds to drive home the disease feel. Because he is a "plague carrier" dragon that spreads disease, we wanted to be sure his look reflected this, so we gave him a sickly green color and covered him with insect-like spikes and barbs. *footage pulled directly from game Dactylĭactyl is one of our undead dragon designs and his look is pure evil. This post will explain how we created some of the most popular dragons in the game (in no particular order).* From there, we look at a lot of different images of lizards, birds, dinosaurs and high fantasy art from around the world so we can nail the perfect look for each dragon. To do this, we have to determine a few things first: the dragon's class, personality and the lore behind the dragon. With such a large volume of them in the game, we are always challenged to make them feel unique from one another. The dragons range from fun and fantastical to dark and deadly.