2009 August | Blender Minutes

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Ara’s Tale – Ara design approaches

First Ara Designs
Being 2 days away from driving to croatia I did not want to further work on the animatics. I feel that I will need quite a time in a stress free environment – not exactly the case now where you have to organize endless minor things to survive your vacation :)
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Ara’s Tale – First Animatics

Animatic frame

I started with the 3d animatics. As explained in Roland Hess’ book ‘Animating with Blender’ I created a rough set and blocky characters and tried to match all the real camera settings with the ones in the storyboard. This turned out to be much fun, as I did not have to rework any shots. They all came out quite well. What I did though was to correct the set layout, where it didn’t match well enough with the storyboard.
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Ara’s Tale – more dragon designs

Dragon design sideview

The dragon is now nearing its completion – design wise. I concentrated on the head and tried several approaches with the above one being the design I am quite satisfied so far.

As this sketch will now be used for actual modeling, I had to do a top view too, and this turned out to be harder than expected. Suddenly I had to draw exact and correlate the top view to the existing side view – this was tedious work for me.

See here for the result

dragon_head_top

I guess actually modeling this beast will be quite an adventure, not to mention animating …

Ara’s Tale – First Dragon Sketches

dragon_02

Some update on the dragon design.

I started playing around with my idea of the dragon – proportions, style and add the details later on.

I do not want to have a stocky 4 legged european type of dragon. I aim for a more elegant sinuous, streamlined form, borrowing some aspects from snakes or even swans. I also want the dragon to have 2 legs and 2 wings, bringing it more in line with the typical morphology for vertebrates on our earth. Also the hind legs shouldn’t be too dominating.

See below for my first tests and approaches to the overall dragon design.

dragon_01

Ara’s Tale – Color/Mood tests

Color Test

I tried several approaches to get the colors the way I want them to be.
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Ara’s Tale – Struggling with design sketches

Environment Design

After finishing the storyboard I am now trying to get a hold on the design sketching – very educating.

As I have no formal education in drawing or painting I have to discover all the bits and pieces and techniques all by myself or through internet digging.

My first goal is to get the environment in a detailed way, but still without colors. See above for my first sketch. It depicts the view out of the canyon to the stairs leading up to the ledge above the abyss.

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