For UV I usually use the application called Unfold3D. It's a useful and very simple program. You can see the final texture coordinates here (Fig.06).


Creating the details is my favorite process among all the stages of character modeling and ZBrush is the ideal assistant for it. It's a real pleasure to see how your model comes to life. Usually I divide the sculpting into three phases. First of all I work on the base groups of muscles and on the main shapes, increasing the subdivs gradually. Next I start to sculpt some medium-sized details, such as the folds of skin for example. And finally I added the smallest minutiae (wrinkles, scales etc) using lots of different Alpha brushes to save tons of time (Fig.07). For the dragon I used brushes which were uploaded to the internet by the talented artist Damir G Martin. You can find them here: http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=114935


After sculpting I had to transfer all the high resolution details from ZBrush to 3ds Max. Usually I do this with the help of a Displacement map and Normal bump. I chose V-Ray for the rendering of my dragon. ZBrush can generate perfect Relief maps and Vray is able to process them excellently (Fig.08).


There is nothing special about the settings I used (Fig.09).



In the next step I drew the texture. I painted the model directly in ZBrush with a Standard brush and without any tricks or complicated settings. The final texture was edited in Photoshop to add some shadows and small details. Periodically I saved the stages of work and rendered them in 3ds Max to give me a more obvious concept about the appearance of the dragon's skin color for the future. You can see the process of painting in Fig.10. I have to apologize for the black background, but these are the old WIP-pictures which I saved for my own workflow, and I didn't think that I would write the article about this model! You may notice some blue glow on the dragon's back in the last render. I made it with a Falloff map to imitate the sky light and different reflexes.