Blend Swap

Check this great beastly mount, perfect for itinerant royalty wanting to stroll through the markets of their sequestered magical city.

I recommend watching this instructional video for a complete explanation of what’s in this file. (Put it at HD)

UPDATES
Added different lighting, environment and compositing. Fixed some IK/FK switching errors on the necks. Reduced the effect of the detail textures in the cataphract shader, as it was muddying the main textures IMHO. Also, I’ve been working with this in 2.57, so beware of it breaking on older versions of Blender. Particularly, I’ve had issues where going between builds often unlinks compositing node groups, and you don’t realize the file is broken until you render.

FEATURES
Squash and stretch IK/FK on the neck, tail, legs and spine.
Integrated IK splines on the necks, tail and spine.
Volume preservation on many things
Eye look/head follow
Compositing setup
Minimalist environment
Starting walk cycle
Probably much more…play with it to find out!

CONTRIBUTORS
The desert scene on Layer 11 started with a scene from Potado, grabbed off of Blendswap.org. Blender 2.5′s metarig system was used for some instances, such as the spine and initial leg setup, so thanks to Nathan Vegdahl, Campbell Barton and the Durian team for that. I use a compositing node group from Luceri, and so should you!

VOCABULARY
Cataphract–an armored heavy mount
Howdah–a half saddle, half gazebo apparatus that goes on elephants and similarly massive mounts.

SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION
Subscribe to my blog, http://ogbog.blogspot.com ! Follow me on Twitter @ogbog! If you’re in Seattle, come to Seabug, it’s free! http://seabug.eventbrite.com

Enjoy!