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Dead Water

@sebright / sebright.tumblr.com

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the-overthinktank

Western style dragons are profoundly mid to me, but i try to keep my trap shut about that because i don't want to be the no fun allowed guy for a very popular creature design. But i cannot contain my rage about spoon wings. I hate them so much. Nothing with a patagium looks like that or flies like that. It doesnt matter how many polygons your beast has, my immersion has been shattered by half of its flight surface being straight up gone

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the-overthinktank

For the people wondering what spoon wings means. Flying animals with a patagium generally have a flight surface that goes down the side of their body to at LEAST the rear leg. This is to maximize surface area for lift and support the weight of the lower body during flight

whereas cgi dragons shooting for an aesthetic of realism are lucky to have a wing membrane that goes down past their ribcage, despite having much heavier legs and tails than the average flying vertebrate. Also there is a tendency to give them a disproportionately broad "hand" which is a wing ratio I've only seen in tiny insects.

I think the reason so many dragons are designed this way (besides cultural inertia) is because the people modeling and animating dragons find a longer patagium inconvenient, since it has a tendency to cover up parts of the animal outside of flight or get pulled around by body movement in ways that a spoon wing doesn't.

Anyways the point is I hate this design trope. I don't like to look at giant stupid wing hands on twiggy arms. I think it is uncooler than realistic wing ratios.

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ashiok-knightmare-weaver

So they should be more like this?

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the-overthinktank

Gold dragons from (media property i have forgotten the name of) get uniqueness points because they have the opposite problem spoon wings have. The hand of their wing is missing instead. I don't think they look great either but i respect them for experimenting with the basic design

Also i am not some authority on what makes dragon wings good, i hope you know you're asking me for an aesthetic realism take because that's what this is

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sebright

This is why Reign of Fire (2002) has one of the coolest dragon designs in media imo. 

#wings
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