Following the tutorial, I learned that you don't need to make a simulation of the entire area, you can just make smaller simulations, export them as a series of basically normal maps, and then try blending them together with a bit of random noise sprinkled in, so that any tiling patterns disappear.

color ramps turn up shockingly often for anything.

If you have a flat plane you want to use as a horizon, make sure you have it somewhat round so the horizon doesn't have an obvious edge.

Water is black, not metallic and not rough whatsoever. It also isn't transparent. Well, it can be, but my water is not.

The ocean modifier is way nicer to use than the fluids simulation system. In that, whenever I try using the fluid simulations, it looks like a ditto having spasms for me.

If you bake the ocean simulation for 150 frames, it just means it's calculating the thing for 150 frames. Unlike for things like movement on circles, it doesn't mean that it'll seamlessly loop.



As for the dragon's body, it's gotten fairly routine: Use a voronoi cell structure and see where the road takes you. However, the rest was new to me:

When downloading a (good) material, it won't just be a texture (ie, an image with the colors that you look at), but also have normal maps, displacement maps, roughness maps, metallic maps with it.

These maps generally are super helpful, but if you don't know what you're doing, plugging them in blindly in your shader may cause your thing to break. For me, the normal map wasn't working. Don't know why, don't want to know just yet – I'd rather learn how to make a proper normal map instead of trying to debug without any knowledge of what this particular normal map was doing.

The principled hair shader is quite cool, and really easy to use. Unfortunately, it seems to not like the geometry I've created here, so instead of nicely shining through, it's creating triangles. Oh well.

Speaking of geometry, this dragon really is just 2½ donuts and a head. For the head, I tried doing sculpting for the first time.



Dragon Head



Sculpting is actually not that difficult, compared to modelling at least. Just turn on Dyntypo (so you create new meshes instead of moving the existing mesh about), and then paint it until it reaches a nice enough shape. I only used the default "draw" brush for this one, except for the spike thingies on the back, for which I used snake hooks. That said, sculpting well probably is difficult. On a scale from programming to painting, modelling is further towards the programming side (where there are rules you have to follow), while sculpting is more towards the painting side (where you just grab the tool and can do your thing, but you need loads of practice to get really good at it).

Sculpting does increase the vertex count asmost as quickly as throwing subdivision surface modifiers onto the model. The head alone is 125k faces, while the entire scene has 212k.

So unless you have a powerful PC, your PC will probably run into issues quickly if you're sculpting anything larger than this head. My PC really was unhappy about all of this, too. I think it's the shortest animation I've made yet, but it has taken the longest to render. But I guess that's because it's the most I've ever asked cycles to do for me.

D-NOISE IS AWESOME! Even if you hand it just a single sample from cycles, it can create a clear scene out of it. This scene obviously isn't identical with the one you were creating, but it's surprisingly close. However, if you use a normal amount of rays (100+, I've used 200), it turns what would otherwise be ugly noise into pretty much what you intended to have. Within a second or two. Witchcraft!

. It'll have to do untilallows looping videos by default, because I ain't uploading this as a GIF many hundreds of MB large. It was awful the last time I tried It's become more of a Chinese dragon this time. It's not a snake with arms , because it's definitely got 5 claws per hand. Underwater. And we'll all believe that. Anyways, what I learned making this... is quite a lot, so I'll separate by area.All in all, these 150 frames took a combined 5h or so to render, so even if I wanted to fix the technical difficulties I'm having, I'd probably not finish in time to comfortably submit this to the Hearts of Steel contest, unless this dragon somehow can grant wishes for a new GPU.Lastly, shoutouts to Greg Zaal for the HDRI , StruffelProductions for the gold material , andfor dragging me into all of this (as well as the hilariously useful tutorials ).PS: It has been pointed out to me that there exists a very relevant song: www.youtube.com/watch?v=13O6ai…