I modeled/textured these serpentine dragons for the Chinese Casino level of Stranglehold. Our design team wanted an interesting gameplay environment where the player could run along these curved shapes, and slide or dive off while shooting the enemies. Our concept team came up with an initial painting to go by, and I modeled it based on their concept and the design team's proxy paths.

To create this object, I first created a renderable spline in 3d max, and posed it in the appropriate shape of the dragon. Using a renderable spline was very useful since I could easily adjust the thickness of the body and curvature around the level. Once I had the position and curves locked down, I created a cylinder which I tiled end - to - end and welded together. I took this cylinder and applied a path deform using that renderable spline I created earlier. This allowed me the freedom to make adjustments easily with minimal texture stretching and quick progress. To created the scales, I modeled a low poly shape of one individual scale, then took that into z-brush to produce a high poly detailed version of that scale. I then arrayed the scales into a tileable sheet and rendered the normal onto a flat plane. I made few minor adjustments in photoshop to the normal map to get it to tile seamlessly. To create the head, I first modeled a medium poly version in 3d max, and then brought it into z-brush to create the high detail mesh for the normal map.

The original concept was more of a white/ivory color/material, but when the Art director and concept lead saw this gold material I created for another asset, they wanted to keep it that way instead.