making the head look better

I was very pleased with the PURRED result. It is light and sturdy.
The paper triangles filled out, so they bulge out. Normally a paper model would start bulging in because you apply pressure from the inside. This causes lighting to accentuate your triangles.
One seem did split a bit, so if I had a fully textured head, I'd have to touch up a few parts, but no problem.
So PUR seemsto work great as long as you give the stuff an escape -route (in this case the eye and nose) when it is expanding.

But now I couldn't resist making teeth out of leftover bits of Pur, by carving them with a knive and painting them. When you carve PUR, you get a surface with many holes, so the teeth aren't that good.
Also you cannot paint this PUR with regular paint, I guess latex will do it, but I haven't got any right now.
This was a bit disappointing.

So I started work on the lower jaw, wich I textured in Lightwave. Not an easy thing to do and I still don't feel I have all the control I want. The texured sheets, I got out of Pepakura, I printed and laminated with BOEKLON, it is basically a plastic sheet you stick onto the paper you want to preserve. It's relatively expensive, but it is completely waterproof. I even tried to carve the scales into the lower jaw, by tracing the lines with a pair of scissors. This way, the light seems to hit the scales. Also I like the way, the thing shines..

This was great, but I feel like when you have lots of scales, which I'm planning to create, this will be too much work, even for a perfectionist, such as myself. The effect is too subtle.

Also I didn't quite like this texture, which as you can see has been stretched because of my lack of knowledge of texturing in lightwave. This seems to accentuate the triangles again. I found I needed more contrast, more dark and a denser pattern in the texture. Also the tromp l'oeil of the lighting of the scales (you now see it upside down) can be stronger. And finally I don't like the texture. The bits don't overlap and its too much of a fish or crocodile skin now.

I did like this however: I prepped the seams with glue, so that it would be watertight and after the glue dried, I put it under a running tap. No amount of rain can match this abuse, but the water-proofing held. As you can see, a small amount of water got through on two seems, that I didn't get, but it hardly interupts the texture.
Also there is almost no discoloring. So it seems, we can build a water-proof or at least rain-proof dragon. That is a load of my mind.





 I also tried different methods. The head, I painted black (just the nose, to give it a try) and I created scales by fingerpainting. You put a litte bit of blue on the tip of your finger and put white and darkblue at the edges. Than you put a fingerprint/stamp on the dragon. It's really easy to do and would be great if I wanted a simple look. The textured version is much more sophisticated and can be much subtler in colour. Also you can see the problem with the teeth, which are made of carved PUR. So although this was fun to do, I decided against it for now. I did learn however, that by making the dragon's skin dark, the triangles dissapeared altogether. I just need to put black on the overlap of the bits I glue together, or I'll have little white stripes everywhere.
Also I learned that a great way to get some defenition out of pepakura even with low grade textures, is to print a textured version of the model to PDF and then open it at high resolution in photoshop. There you can fix the resolution, by repainting and touching up the texture. After that you can print it from photoshop.

I also experimented with a little thing called Enzo . It's a plug-in for photoshop that allows you to open 3D objects (lightwave and many others) and paint directly onto the 3D surface, using everything photoshop has to offer.
You can then go to a flat view, where you have a layer with the UV's.
Here you can paint your texture and apply it back to 3D, touch it up and so on. It is a great tool, although 299,- is to much for me.
After all, you can do about the same thing in lightwave and almost every 3D package. It just takes three times longer, because you have to switch programs every few minutes.
I started experimenting with this, because I have a colleague, who feels right at home in photoshop, but is not that happy in any 3D program.. This might be a good solution for that problem. But it's not worth 299,- in my opinion. I did use it to create the texture that I like the most, up to now.