Dragon spine editing

One of the things I worked on this week was a new way of handling dragon proportions in the dragon creator, specifically for the length of the three spine segments neck, torso and tail. When it's done, this new system will allow pretty extreme changes without breaking the quality or physics, unlike the previous version which got worse the further you pushed it.

The way it was handled before was pretty simple, the dragons were basically stretched or squeezed to edit the length of the spine segments, which works pretty well for small changes. However, when you try to push it to the extremes to get something more serpentine like Smaug, Caraxes from HotD, or even an Eastern dragon, the quality rapidly decreases in several areas because you still have the same amount of geometry, bones and physics bodies to work with but a lot more area to cover. Some things also don't work well when stretched, like spikes on the back of the neck for example. When the neck gets longer, you don't want the same number of spikes but elongated, you just want more of them to fill out the new areas. So we needed a different approach.

With this new system, changing the length of the spine segments works a bit like in the game Spore. You can drag either end of the spine to add/remove bones in increments, which extends/shrinks the neck and tail. Then you can move the back leg position along the spine to extend the torso. There's no stretching any more, when you increase the length it adds more geometry, bones and physics bodies to make sure all different length variations have the same quality.

There's technically no limit to how long the spine can be stretched because you can just keep adding to it, but each additional increment requires more work (going back to the neck spikes example, each additional increment would require making another variant of the neck spikes to fill out the area). The limit is still being worked out but it will be set so that it encompasses all well known dragons, including those mentioned before.