Skip to main content

Final Fantasy's 'Bahamut' Redesign

ConceptArt.org's forums often hold a Creature of the Week contest. Many of my older posts from a few years ago were typically revolved around these contests and I can certainly see how much I've developed from my posts back in 2012... It's been a couple years since I last entered though, and with the latest contest sounding as fun as it did I couldn't resist trying to see what I came up with.

Final Design
This weeks topic was to redesign the Elder Dragon 'Bahamut' from the Final Fantasy series. Bahamut is typically shown as an almost anthropomorphized dragon, with an upright body and large wings. However, I wanted to try spending this time designing a more feral creature.


I started by trying to draw some very strange dragon shapes, adjusting proportions and wing spans. I had an image of a lumbering creature with huge wings and small arms originally.


Eventually I settled on the more typical draconian design, trying to keep the wings the main focus of this silhouette. However I seem realized that this was more wyrm-like, and not as large and bulky as I would have liked.


This design felt much more in line with what I had wanted. A nice reptiallian design, with a solid silhouette and line of action following through the body. The one issue I was worried about detailing however, was the wings. I had a rough copy but this was far from a nice version I could work details and perspective from.


I ended up building a very quick set of wings in Maya and taking several screen shots to make sure I had the angles right. With that down it was time to decide what the face of the dragon would be.


I tried your usual dragon style heads, as well as the more horror types, with beady eyes, or even not any eyes at all.


Now I had my sketch down, and my head designed I threw down some quick values to assign where the focus would be. From here on out it was simply tidying up and making this beast presentable.



And there we have it. A final finished Bahamut Redesign.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Terryl Whitlatch Creature Course #1

I recently signed up to a creature design course hosted by Terryl Whitlatch on Schoolism. I'm a huge fan of Terryl's work, so it'll be interesting to see how I develop my creature work whilst on her course. These should be weekly updates, and this week's topic was to try and get a grasp of the fundamentals of creature design. So our challenge was to draw a human, a tetrapod, and a human/animal hybrid. Then break those down by rig, skeleton and musculature and label each. Here's what I came up with:
Post a Comment
Read more

Portrait Progression

I've recently been doing a self directed course from Conceptart.org. One of the tasks was to spend 3 hours trying to paint a self portrait so you could observe all the light effectively. I'm happy with how the portrait came out, but recently a hashtag on Twitter called '#anyonecanimproveatdrawing' has been floating about, and it reminded me of a portrait I had painted of myself a few years back. I thought it might be interesting to show the improvement so here you go:
Post a Comment
Read more

Armour Studies & Material Spheres

I decided to spend some of my spare time the last few weeks doing some armour studies. This had initially started as just a bit of practice on the side, but after some really positive feedback and some requests for a tutorial I ended up making an entire collection of texture spheres and cleaned up a lot of the studies so people could better understand how to paint these types of things too. Firstly we have the finished studies themselves. I had tried gathering a few different types of armour specifically to understand both their design, and their material properties, so we have things from clean plate mail to tanned leather and rusted metal. These took some time on their own, but I then decided to create material spheres for as select few textures. For those of you who haven't come across material spheres before, they are used as a way of studying and showing how light works on various types of textures, it gives you all the variables of having a strong focal li...
Post a Comment
Read more