Dragons. For your pleasure.

By Salireths

And here we get to the round two of our voting poll! Previous round overwhelmingly shown the love, the desire, the lust for Dragons… Which is just perfect, after all, there is no one better than Dragons! So let's create a few!

I apologize this took a bit longer than I initially planned - I was busy investigating new venues of how I could extend the reach of our Gateway, but I'll get back to this another time, now let's talk design.

Sketches

These sketches represent a general "ballpark" direction of what sort of Dragon we could be creating, but not yet exact - more work is needed (it is still a work-in-progress).

VARIANT #1 "LONG" 

VARIANT #2 "ROBUST" 

The point of this poll is for you to tell me which one of these sketches I should keep working on. Once we determine the winner, I will finalize the concept, add a bunch of customization options and bodyparts, then turn it all into finished 3D models.

These models will become parts for character editor and will appear in the upcoming build. Additionally, I plan on making them available as avatars for usage outside the game, for example in virtual worlds (e.g. NeosVR, VRchat, SecondLife) and just as models for regular 3d software (Blender) to let everyone create animations/stills with them, but that’s also a topic (quite an exciting one) for another day.

VARIANT #3 "DIRE" 

VARIANT #4 "STRONG" 

All the variants presented here include the orthograde (anthro) and pronograde (feral) variants, because my idea is to make it possible for the character to seamlessly "transform" in-between. We are still not sure yet it's going to work exactly like that, but its something we'd like to try.

Please bear with my terminology: the more common "Feral" and "Anthro" words are just too blunt as they additionally can describe the mentality of the creature, while "Pronograde" and "Orthograde" (respectively) describe only the posture of the spine.

That being said, we will be focusing on finishing orthograde first, not because preference (I personally like pronograde Dragons more), but because of orthogrades have a bit more versatility and easier to animate, not to mention we already have a lot of animations for them.

VARIANT #5 "NIMBLE" 

The first two variants ("#1 Long" and "#2 Robust") have multiple orthograde sketches: this is just to represent a couple different customizations, created either via swapping bodypart models or via using sliders that change proportions. The one highlighted in the middle is supposed to be the "base model", the rest is derived from it - the goal to let people customize the creatures to a similar degree.

Muzzles

MUZZLES 

Initially I wanted to cast a vote on these head designs, but I don't think it's necessary (unless you folks would want to). I have picked a few favorites from those quick sketches already, and I will be doing more muzzle designs after we determine the right body-type to proceed with. 

And because I'll be making more faces anyway, don't pay too much attention to those when choosing a variant of your liking, its easy enough to make new ones.

That being said, please let me know which ones are you favorite still! Even if I don't always reply to the comments here, I read it all and I do take notes! Like actual, written notes, not mental ones that I keep forgetting.

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That will be all for now! Patreon for some reason likes to make the images way too small, that's why I included imgur links under each embed, plus you can also download them here in the attachments.

With lots of Dragon Love,
     - Salireths.