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.
Once again, progress is slower than I would have it, but at least its there :). Summer, real life and my first freelance jobs are taking their toll. Also, there is no music added to the timelapse, I just didn’t find the extra time to do this.
What took longer than anticipated, was to lock down the exact color palette to use for the dragon. I had some color sketches from the preproduction phase which gave the general direction, but to find the right balance was challenging. With a combination of testrenders and quick compositing with the real environment I gradually approached, what I envisioned in the beginning. With small hue variations and careful overpainting the basic palette was then locked down.
The timelapse shows the overall progress on painting the diffuse map for the dragon’s body. Its starts from defining the base color distribution. Then I use separate channels in Mari to paint some details in.
One channel is used for the veins. I separated this channel to be able to use it as template for the bump map later on. With this I can assure that the bumps follow exactly the painted veins.
Another channel is then used for the tiny details and variations the skin shows.
The diffuse part is not yet finished, but I decided to show the state as it is right now.
Some notes on the UV layout and planning of the texture sizes:
A thorough analysis of the shots, where the dragon is seen, shows that the wings will populate most of the screen space when the dragon is seen in total. The rest of the body takes up a relatively small space.This results in two patches, one for the wings and one for the body (without the head), which will both use 4K maps for the different channels.
Then there are closeup shots of the dragon’s head and one shot in particular where the front part of the head is seen and the camera moves in until only the nose part uses ~60% of screen space. This results in two patches for the head, where the front part will use 8K maps.
The shot analysis also gives a good idea on how detailed the textures have to be.
The wings e.g are in constant motion and therefore a lot of motion blur will be applied in post. Adding too much of details would be a waste of time, but as you can see in the timelapse, I sometimes forget about this, … painting with Mari is so much fun … 🙂
The head textures will have to be very detailed though, and my guess is, that I will spent a lot of time there …
Well here is the timelapse video:
2 weeks of summer vacation are now on schedule and right after that work on Ara’s Tale can resume, … I hope.
