Work on Ara’s Tale has stopped now for almost 3 weeks as I am recovering from H1N1 (swine) flu and, triggered by the flu, still enduring a light pneumonia.
So, sadly it will take some time before I can resume my work on Ara’s Tale.
Where scale here stands for the relative size of things rather than the parts constituting the skin of a dragon.
During work and planning for my short ‘Ara’s Tale’ I explored some intrinsics of blenders hair implementation in regard to actual size of models in combination with animation. What seemed rather simple in the beginning turned out to be quite tricky to apply for my needs.
But first things first.
Here is a peek at the current state of Ara. The time since my last update was quite interesting and informative.
After finishing the head I did a small detour into hair simulation. I needed to know if I am able to give Ara a hair ring of sorts ( as in the concept drawing) and be able to control the hair, so that it doesn’t pass through the ring ,even if wind is blowing and Ara is moving.
For the moment I have abandoned the idea of a hair ring due to technical reasons. I simply was not able to achieve a convincing effect.
Next I had to model the body. This posed a completely different problem. I needed reference photos of a 11 year old girl. Me, being an adult male I deemed it not a very wise idea to go looking for these sort of images on the internet 
. I ended up using photos taken 2 years ago from my daughter, which gave me quite some good references.
The body won’t be seen anyways, so I didn’t do too much on good topology or exact modeling. I wanted to have a good basis for the dress. And this send me to just another detour again. I wanted to know if using the cloth simulation had any impact on decisions to be made during the actual modeling of the body and/or dress. I had to force me back on track as I tended to get distracted with all these nice toys.
Anyway, I learned a way how to use the cloth simulation for my purpose.
I ‘cheated’ with the feet. I took the feet from a makehuman model and heavily modified it and attached it to Ara. As the feet will only be seen from far away and then mostly covered by the dress, this is quite acceptable.
The hands now are a totally different story. Similar to the face there are at least two shots where you will see the hands in closeup, so the hands should be modeled with care. Hands are my second first time modeling experience during this project ( the face being the first one) and I really wasn’t sure if I could come up with something satisfying. Again I used my daughters hands as reference. After looking at some tutorials I gave it a try and I dare to say I managed quite well.
Current production status
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8:45 Animatics
42:02 Concept Art
--12:00 Ara Design
--18:35 Color Tests
--11:27 Dragon Design
78:06 Modeling
--35:01 Ara
--43:05 Dragon
21:51 Research
--1:16 2d-art
--1:30 animation
--12:00 effects
--7:05 modeling
4:00 Rigging
--4:00 Dragon
4:30 Script
21:25 Storyboard
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180:39 Total
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