Sidenius
patreon
Dragon spine editing
🕑 Added 2025-06-15 23:15:33 +0000 UTCOne of the things I worked on this week was a new way of handling dragon proportions in the dragon creator, specifically for the length of the three spine segments neck, torso and tail. When it's done, this new system will allow pretty extreme changes without breaking the quality or physics, unlike the previous version which got worse the further you pushed it.
The way it was handled before was pretty simple, the dragons were basically stretched or squeezed to edit the length of the spine segments, which works pretty well for small changes. However, when you try to push it to the extremes to get something more serpentine like Smaug, Caraxes from HotD, or even an Eastern dragon, the quality rapidly decreases in several areas because you still have the same amount of geometry, bones and physics bodies to work with but a lot more area to cover. Some things also don't work well when stretched, like spikes on the back of the neck for example. When the neck gets longer, you don't want the same number of spikes but elongated, you just want more of them to fill out the new areas. So we needed a different approach.
With this new system, changing the length of the spine segments works a bit like in the game Spore. You can drag either end of the spine to add/remove bones in increments, which extends/shrinks the neck and tail. Then you can move the back leg position along the spine to extend the torso. There's no stretching any more, when you increase the length it adds more geometry, bones and physics bodies to make sure all different length variations have the same quality.
There's technically no limit to how long the spine can be stretched because you can just keep adding to it, but each additional increment requires more work (going back to the neck spikes example, each additional increment would require making another variant of the neck spikes to fill out the area). The limit is still being worked out but it will be set so that it encompasses all well known dragons, including those mentioned before.
Comments
Gustaf
Yes, it'll be the flagship feature of the next update. No time frame yet, there is still a lot of work left before it's ready to test.
IlovemyMan
You need to download it, I cant remember if it was from here, look for a link
zac
how do u start playing dragontwin
Donavon Spurgin
I noticed the elongation of spikes and fins in your video going over the first iteration of creator and was hoping you would do exactly this, fantastic work as always. Now to the real question, are you going to make this creator available to supporters to test and push the system? and if so, do you have a time frame, i do not mean to be pushy, but this is one of the most exciting games ive come across so far. once again, thank you.
Jonathan Antonis
serpentine dragons like smaug ????? i love it im so excited.
August Shettler
We really need Balerion sized dragons to ride will we get the option to ride leviathans?
