Bearded Dragon BABIES!!

Well, not quite yet. But while I was working on a 3D model of her boyfriend, my female decided it was time and dropped a clutch about two dozen strong. Mom's healthy though evidently uncomfortable, while the eggs have been transferred (from an egg-laying bin full of peat moss) into a ghetto incubator made up of a 75 watt lightbulb heating up a vermiculite-filled leftover Chinese food container. Hey, at least I stabilized the temperature at 83 degrees.Allow me to take this occasion to post some pictures of a dragon clutch from a few years ago. I think you'll agree that kittens and puppies have NOTHING on how cute hatchling bearded dragons are.

Okay with that out of the way, let's get to work, as this is a WIP blog after all. I did some UV mapping on my beardie model. For the uninitiated, UV mapping means taking the geometry and flattening it out in the most economical way on a two dimensional image. To make it easier, I removed certain parts from the whole (in UV space), such as the legs, head, jaw, etc. After some doing, here is what I came up with. If you have nothing better to do, try to figure out which parts correspond to what part of the lizard! :DDDD

The spikes are not UVed, as I plan to throw a procedural texture on them. Now, this *would* work, but we want to make better use of the space. After some playing around with placement, this is a much better arrangment:

And this what the dragon looks like with the good ol' checker pattern. Besides looking awesome, this lets us see where the texture would be stretched or warped (by way of stretched or warped squares). As you can see, this guy's looking pretty good.

Next stop, Mudbox for texturing and normal map painting. God I hope my tablet still works.