Compared to a lot of dragons in the game, Oswin arguably looks a bit bland.
But on the technical side of things, I think he's by far one of THE most intriguing dragons since he's one of the five base dragons and was originally intended to be Nestor - I'll get to that in a bit, it's time to yammer about devamping him.
First and foremost: apologies for the delay, 2.79's resolution still refuses to cooperate.
And to think I considered the triangulation and twisting of Oswin's arms to be a major roadblock… All said and done, at least I can justify fixating on THAT. The same can't be said for my overfocus on reshading his turban.
Did I mention fretting over painting his snout and the war between making his vert colours appeal to me and replicating the highlights/shading on his vanilla model without adding too much extra geometry? Fucking cheeks, man. Those were fun. If I'd known they were gonna piss me off and metallicising his collar would be nowhere as difficult as I feared, I wouldn't have put it off until the end.
Also, there's a chance that Oswin's anims were SLIGHTLY borked when I extracted them. From what I've seen testing his vanilla model in Blender and comparing it with ingame footage, his teeth and lip bones may be acting up - so you might notice things looking a bit weird and clippy in that vid.
Ahem. Now it's time for the fun part.
While they all have individual armatures for their props and all those little differences, each dragon in Reignited belongs to one of five body types and SKEL files.
Notice how Nestor and Tomas aren't their groups' bases despite being the first ones found in level order.
I'd imagine that a fair chunk of the dragon pipelines were done by the time Reignited's announcement trailer was released - either way, Nestor WOULD have been the first regular dragon found in the game had he kept his original design.
So here we've got a render of Oswin (back when he was intended to be Nestor) from Oskar Kuijken's ArtStation, and an image taken from CartridgeClubNA on Twitter - I'm pretty sure it's a photo of Oswin's concept art from the Reignited artbook; I'm not sure who designed him, but it looks like Jeff Murchie's artstyle so I'm guessing it was him?
Per Kuijken, he did Oswin's baking and materials, Dimi Devos handled pretty much everything else with the model beforehand, and then Toys for Bob redid the colours once "Nestor" was repurposed into the Oswin we all know and love.
But what about Delbin, you might ask? He's muscular too.
Turns out Delbin ALSO got the redesign/repurpose treatment.
These images also come from Kuijken's ArtStation and CartridgeClubNA's Twitter respectively. Pretty sure that concept art's another of Murchie's works.
According to the Spyro wiki (and CartridgeClubNA), the Reignited artbook says Delbin originally had Nevin's design - which means two of the three muscular Artisans were turned into muscular-type dragons later in development.
That leaves Gavin. Coincidentally, Nicholas Kole designed Nestor, Delbin and him.
But really, that just raises more questions. As the only other muscular dragon until Peace Keepers, I can't help but wonder why he isn't the base dragon for his body group - and Asher's like the penultimate Peace Keeper dragon by level order. Gotta wonder why the muscular group base wasn't Gunnar or Boris…or any of the prior Ice Cavern dragons sans Todor.
It's ironic considering Asher might've been a different dragon at first.
This is a collection of Devon Cady-Lee's Peace Keeper concepts taken from the Spyro wiki. Specifically, they depict Asher, Andor, Ulric, Gunnar and Boris...just maybe not in that order.
Take a look at Cady-Lee's coloured concept of Asher, again sourced from the Spyro wiki.
He's red here instead of his usual purple, which probably isn't as big a deal as Nestor/Oswin and Delvin/Nevin considering there's two red dragons in the same level as him - and Ragnar wasn't even red in OG Spyro 1 anyway. Maybe he was originally supposed to be Ulric?
Any of the gripes I've had on this journey aside, I mean it - I'm really invested about this kind of behind-the-scenes stuff, both what we know and what I need to speculate.
Gotta try get my hands on the artbook sometime and uncover more hidden mysteries.
Hi Jak and Daxter community, please accept my doodles and sketches as an offering of peace from a newcomer. I will play the original trilogy when I get the hardware, I promise.
The left side and right sides of the Japanese Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal (PS2) Complete Guide Book have a flip-book style animation if you turn the pages quickly.
The first feathered dragon! Alban's weights needed work (and still do), but his legs and tail fared better than I thought they would.
I need to remember to slap a screenie of his vanilla wings onto these ones and test how well they animate before I (eventually) move onto the texture phase.
The transition from warm hues at the top to cool towards the bottom did my head in when shading and so did whatever in the zebra-loving hell is going on with those horns. Alban's neck looks like it's got a stark shift in colour from one side of his scarf to the other and that collarbone-spanning stripe certainly doesn't make it easier for me to discern.
I feel like it'll be easier to nix the stripes until the texture phase (tried doing some of them one-sided, hated the results), but I left some on his head - it seemed kinda bare without them.
But those tail feathers…
Their weights are so out of sync with the tail's, even in vanilla. It cost a couple extra tris, but I replaced that slab with proper-ish geometry so it'll look somewhat presentable for the time being (and make it easier to reweight).
Might need an extra loop in the tail round where the feather cluster starts because there's a split second in Alban's exit anim where the base verts just completely drift away. I hope it's not too noticeable...
blakekathryn
tangentwithtanner
