Designing Dark Fantasy-Style Dragon With ZBrush & Substance 3D Painter

The Green Dragon Project

The Green Dragon is a recent creature concept based on a series of dragon busts that I've done. Mostly to practice design and go through a quick pipeline. Following the series of red, black, and purple ones, I wanted to continue with a green one. Generally, they follow a bit of a dark fantasy vibe.

In this case, it was a good opportunity to explore some different textures, like moss, and techniques for spawning leaves and grass on the mesh. I imagined the dragon's skin would be quite rich in nutrients, and being large, it would scrape moss, dirt, and leaves from its surroundings.

Sculpting

The concept started out in ZBrush with a quick sketch. I wanted to push the silhouette quite a bit with this one and play around with different types of horns. I usually don't have a very clear idea when I start sketching. Often things change, in this case you can see the horns angle changes even though the shape is generally kept.

The first sketch is quite rough, but the outline of the shapes and design is quite clear. I then just added details and refined my base, using a combination of alphas, masking, and some custom-made brushes.

Topology

I then used ZRemesher and unwrapped the model quickly by using playgroup-based auto unwrapping. As it's just a concept sketch, I didn't want to get bogged down by technical aspects. I leave that for proper production projects.

Texturing

Textures were done in Substance 3D Painter, quickly laying down some smart materials to create more detail and surface imperfections. Substance 3D Source has a large library with some great materials to use. I focused on adding gradients and establishing a focal point which is usually the head.

It's also great to preview certain moods, sometimes using the Iray mode or just rotating the HDRI for dramatic lighting effects. This helps inform me how my model looks in more extreme lighting conditions and how the textures hold up in those.

Lighting & Rendering

Once done, I sent it back to Blender, set up my scene with an HDRI and a backdrop, and then started playing with lights. Usually, in the previous dragon sketches, I always kept it simple in the background, so I went for something similar here.

These other shots don't use the backdrop and are using an HDRI as the background:

I used a Geometry Nodes-based plug-in named Geo-Scatter to place some grass and leaves on the dragon. I did this just to test how optimized I could keep things and what kind of control methods I had.

I had used it previously for some environments but never really on a creature or character mesh. I was quite satisfied with the results.

The final result was a good addition to my dragon bust series. It let me explore a new idea and practice a few things. I'm looking forward to continuing this series with different themes and colors in the future.

Gino Kölling, Principal 3D Creature/Character Artist