The baby dragon's sculpted final form ripples with cuteness and ferocity. By starting with rough, destructive sculpting and low-commitment drafting methods, lots of ideas could be explored quickly. We then refined muscles and bones, increasing the amount of detail at every step. Lastly, the final patina of scales, wrinkles, and ridges were added with stencils, brush textures, and polygon counts soaring into the millions.
Unfortunately, the huge poly count limits this sculpture's usefulness. Animation rigs will strain to move, rendering engines will choke on the complex details, and real-time game engines are way out of reach. In the next chapter, we'll fix that by creating a usable mesh with a reasonable poly count, then bake important details from our high-poly sculpture to our medium-poly production mesh.