I used 4.0's warp features to fit the scales and pose the dragon. I also added some new tools to help select parts of a large mesh and detach them. This meant I could work with the whole 2 million poly dragon, and then split it up into parts for different materials.
This was quite light on sculpting, I used Curvy's displacement maps to add muscles to the limbs. The head needed a bit of hand-sculpting.