A small update just to show off what a little modeling/sculpting can do to a shot.
It may be common knowledge, but for me its my first movie project and I am just amazed how dramatically the shot changed by just substituting the blocked environment with a fully modeled and sculpted one. The changes are so big in fact, that I may have to revisit some of the camera settings in the other shots to better deal with the added detail. A very intriguing process.
I wonder if the effects when applying the textures, proper lighting and compositing are as huge as this one.
I have put together a video which shows shot 3 simultaneously in the two versions.
Keep in mind that only basic modeling and scultping was done. Lighting setup is nearly non existent, just to be able to see something
This turned out to be much more time consuming than expected.
Modeling and sculpting are very near in my workflow. I create a base model and sculpt the details, which will be applied back to the model using normal maps. From the scultping process I also derive an AO map for direct inclusion into the model’s shader.
Based on very valuable input and feedback from Richard Culver and Germano Martin I spent quite some time reworking some of the shots and editing.
The basic idea here is to get more involved with Ara. To let the viewer feel what she feels and thus pulling one into the story. Richard and Germano made some very good points and suggested various changes and/or additions. Based on this input I stepped back a little and tried to get a fresh point of view for the project. Now I have to add a ‘Special Thanks’ section to the credits
After reworking the dragon rig and some test flights I started doing the animation for actual shots from Ara’s Tale.
Its now the same with the dragon as it was with Ara in the first shots. I had to get familiar with the rig and methods to get the dragon flying. I am now back at 10+ hours per shot but getting better (I hope).
Although the dragon was modeled first, I decided back then to postpone the production rig to later. I wanted to gain experience with Ara’s rig, both from the perspective of rigging as well as animating.
I have completed the animation (albeit some left out polishing) for the first ~ 3min, which I have decided to show publicly here on my blog and the internet during the production phase.
As promised previously, I finished shots 02,03,04 and 08.
Shot 02 and 04 are animated as one piece and edited to the two shots seen in the video below. Shot02 was the first longer shot where I had to do facial animation to portray Ara’s emotions. It turned out that I used almost the same emotional expression as in shot07. That was not planned and may hint either at my limited ability to portray emotions or limitations in Ara’s facial rig. Or it could be both.
After having returned from my honeymoon, its time again to keep on working on Ara’s Tale. I had 2 shots ready before I left to egypt and worked now hard to get two additional shots ready.
Its not easy right now as I am fighting against some unknown infection, which keeps me from working more on the short, but I hope to get well soon.
I have put the last shot of scene 01 and the the shots from scene 02 togehter to get an idea of the flow. Keep in mind that shots 2-4 are missing from here.
Next I will either do the missing shots or work on the panning shots directly after shot07.
