Internal shots are proving to be something that is requiring a lot of thought. The issue is that the throat, crop, stomach and guts are all very tight, and expand around things as they enter them. I've watched a few endoscopy videos and such in the past and at the moment, I'm not sure my level of skill is such that I could pull off a realistic depiction of internals and not have it look totally awful. It may be possible, if you cheat and imagine a bubble around the viewer that the insides react to, this is something I'll likely explore in the future. Although it adds a great deal of complexity to something which is already very difficult due to how close the view is to the surfaces.

For now I'm swaying toward imagining the insides of the creature as being expanded with air. This is something I've seen in every single piece of POV internal art I've seen so far. It's understandable and to be honest, art is a representation of reality meant to illicit or convey a feeling or emotion. Not every piece needs to be as if we had taken a photo of something that exists as it exists. All the same I'm a little less than satisfied at stopping at that so I will be pushing every aspect of realism that I can forwards. In the art I produce like this, and with all future techniques.

The second less significant problem is the lighting. I do like to try and keep a sense of realism here too. However it would be very boring if all my internal shots were simply a black screen. I don't really want to go the route of my characters insides glowing, it feels a bit off for me. Most forms of light we have made, wouldn't last long in a dragon, unless specially designed. It's not really fitting to the story-lines to have the dragon eat a specialist piece of equipment to light his insides every time either. My solution for now is those little snap lights you can get for concerts. I'm also going to pursue having them breakdown and the glowing fluid spill out. This could be a very interesting thing to depict.

I have been working on ideas for how to do the internal stuff and produced a few early renders that I'm very pleased with. I will likely upload a collection of these as a scrap; a sort of sneak preview of what will come later and what I'm up to. OpenGL renders for internals tend to look awful because of the lack of lighting so some imagination may be required until 1.0, seeing an output render of the insides will help with that.

Any ideas, suggestions or responses to these thoughts are very welcome. ^..^