Looks good man, I have to say at that rez I can't see a huge amount of detail in the mesh, A close up might be in order. Some kind of elaborate animation where we get to see him close up and then pull back for the fire breathing. Also i'm not sure if you are going for a cartoon or realistic style to this. At the moment it seems like a mix of both. Also afterburn might be a good idea for the fire.

Hope this helps, good work man.

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Thanks for the crits and suggestions man. Yeah he doesnt hold up too well on close inspection. now that I look at him I'm not happy with his claws really. I'd like to make another animation with him sometime. I added two stills to show the displacement
I really like the workflow using zbrush for a higher resolution version. I'd like to try doing different morphs by mixing different displacement maps and linking them into morph targets. I'm making a crazy mexican character right now so I might try that with him soon .

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There are a few little bits of stretching in the displacement but overall it looks pretty damn cool. How'd you rig up the wings? I did a devil character in Max a while back and had all sorts of trouble with the wings, mainly with the skin in between. It never folded quite right and would break quite regularly. I think I used a linked xform from memory. (After trying cloth and allsorts of nightmarish stuff like that.)

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yeah, I found its a bit hard because you cant preview the results while animating, like if it was all there in the viewport I could have been carefull with the poses and or built morphs into the rig to fix it up. Thats one thing I love about Maya, its so much better for setting up things like morphs that are connected to bone rotations etc using set driven keys, but this one is all max because vray displacement is far far easier to work with, I hate rendering in mental ray (no offence to anyone but I cant stand it, especially in maya). I rigged the wings with a bone structure that folded in and I had
a control object in the centre that rotated both wings in opposite directions to get the flapping up and down by just animating the one control. the skinning worked quite well on the wings in this case but I think i was just lucky, i did weight them by hand using the weight tool though. they fold up pretty well but I havent made an animation of him landing and scrunching them back yet.

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Seems like a pretty efficient rig. I'd be keen to see an animation of the wings folding if you ever do one.

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