I thought I share some test renders from the current state of texturing the dragon and already playing around with the material/shading setup.
The basic building blocks are done with quite some polishing work still left. Doing the test renders, helps me to better estimate which changes are really necessary.
… and I see myself in the 3rd year of production of Ara’s Tale.
And similar to last year, summer was a phase of relatively low activity in regard to this project. RealLife(TM), health issues and the occasional freelance jobs contended heavily for my available time.
A very quick tip for using normal maps in Mari, which were generated with blender.
When painting textures, I like to have the generated normal map displayed. This gives much more control over the painting process.
Unfortunately, the normal maps generated with blender didn’t display well inside Mari, and, having too little knowledge about the use of normal maps across different platforms, I almost accepted this.
A discussion on the blender bugtracker gave me the idea to try to invert certain channels.
In the end it was inverting the green channel, which gave the desired result
And this is how to setup the normal map shading module:
Allthough I am still only at the beginning of texturing the dragon, there is quite some recorded screen material to be used as a timelapse screencast.
The days since my last post have been quite busy in regard to Ara’s Tale.
A lot work revolved around Ara’s Song. This song has always been a central piece of the movie and ever since I wrote this part of the script I dreaded the time when finally the decision had to be made who should sing this song.
… is due.
As I have just heard today, I won the blenderday award 2011. Or to be more precise, 3 sequences from Ara’s Tale got me the award.
Besides the fame and glory, the award comes with a price: a GTX 560i 2GB graphics card. Just the right stuff to tackle texturing the dragon with Mari 
Ara’s Tale already scores its first award and isn’t even released yet 
So, now I will open my bottle of Ardbeg Renaissance ( reserved for special moments) and raise my glass to this nice surprise.
ps: for fans of single malt scotch whiskeys, this one is definitely one you should try.
Today it is exactly 2 years, that the first work on Ara’s Tale was started. It was a very (very) rough sketch of Ara and the dragon (a shot which I have not shown here) done in mypaint.
I have decided to change the license for all content on my site to the less restrictive Creative Commons Attribution license.
It makes certain things easier that way …
… well, not really, but at least one of its icons may start to get more widely used.
My model of the Austrian Imperial Crown was used in showcasing a new line of research on realtime raytracing at the Advanced Graphics Labs at Intel.
As it turns out, the model seems quite good for testing these type of algorithms, and the model along with the source code will be available under an open license directly from intel.
Well, what can I say. There is nothing like seeing your model all over the place and intel using it as demonstration for their new technology.
That means visually Ara’s Tale has reached 50% completion.
The last 3 shots where very demanding in various aspects and thus took much longer than anticipated.
