Now its finally time to make the first shots of the main set a reality. After a lot of fiddling with the scultping and texturing of the canyon rock walls I have now decided to continue work on the actual shots.
For a time it looked like I might had the incredible luck of getting a prolonged demo license of Mari, as Jack Greasley the product manager of Mari contacted me directly. In exchange of some material and helping a bit in marketing Mari I was to receive this license. Alas the dream was just that – a dream, but a very nice one. I do not know what happened, but after inquiring 3 times I think I should accept it and let it be a nice dream 🙂
There is still some sculpting/texturing work to do ( the dragon comes to mind 🙂 ), let alone some major vfx work, but for motivation’s sake I had to start to produce finalized shots 🙂
There are quite some shots to do before the dragon actually appears, and thats what I want to do for the next time.
During the last weeks work on the score has started, and it showed that it would help greatly to have more footage to better balance the score. So this should help Phil as well.
From now on no animations will be shown any more in public. I will post some stills ( as the one above ) if I think it doesn’t give too much away, so it may be a bit less interesting to watch the progress on Ara’s Tale.
On a side note: It is really disturbing how much one forgets in just 4-5 months. I had to study the lighting setups of the first set and some of the compositing tricks I used to be able to start working on the first shot. Fortunately, during the hot lighting phase last year, I had the foresight to make intensive notes in textual form, which helped a lot. I hope that this doesn’t hint at the first signs of a hidden alzheimer 🙂
Wow, you’ve gotten far! I just thought I’d take a look again, and things really seem to be lining up 🙂 Must be a tough one, to live amongst the mountains and try to recreate something as common to you as the human face. Any weirdness will bug you to no end. So far, we’re lucky the Blender sculpt mode has been that much improved! It just must be horrible to get all the detail into rock that belongs to it, so it doesn’t look dull because the texture resolution is too low for something that edgy.
Btw., I really envy you for your bedroom view. I won’t post a pic of mine! 😀
Hi Markus !
Nice to hear from you again !
Well, yes, work is continuing and right now I have entered a phase where I make good progress, so hopefully the date 2011 in the teaser was not wrongly put there.
And yes, my bedroom view is quite a sight :).
You are still working with blender ?
I tried writing from my cell phone a couple of times and it never worked, I should finally know that!
Once you’ve got momentum back in, I’m sure it will flow nicely. Considering you estimated at least 10 years of Blender a necessity to put out a short, you’re proceeding really well 🙂
Yes, I do! I had a long break though, when I finished my 2D-degree. Getting into 2.56/6 now, hairy, hairy… 😉 Trying on a Pyramid with an allseeing eye, well, maybe it’ll end up as Photoshop comp again…