So far i've put clothes on Alston, sculpted in the details, and put in some skin colour. I've also redone the dragon sculpt and now finished the UV's on the body. More screenshots will follow when i'm done having a fever and sneezing.

Alston before he begins climbing

How Alston will not NOT walk

So, started blocking out some walking for Alston. Not very useable, but funny none the less.

Dragon fall

Last part of that shot (think). Cameras still needs proper setup.

Cactus

Made a couple of cactuses, quick and dirty. Might work if we put them very far away...

Dragons & Eggs take 2

Did some more. Pretty sloppy animation, and i just now realized the shot is mirrored from what the storyboards said. Meh... Easily fixed. Its just the previs anyway.




Second part. Cameras is higly likely to be different once Aleksander gets his fancy camera rig up, so i didnt other putting them together.

Dragons & eggs

Did some reskinning yesterday, as it got bugged. Started this also. Don't think i'll get time for much today. I'll sit here working tomorrow while regretting the 5 last beers i had this evening.

Climb scene previs WIP

Just a quick start. Not all the animation is there, timing is off and the camera won't be quite like this.

Dragon basemesh turntable

The base mesh for max in a 360 view. Details will be put in normal/displacement diffuse and specular maps after the previs is done.

Edit: Quality as a flash move is crap, and Final Gather has made a few flickering artifacts. Will do better next time.

Update so far

Things done:

Puppetshop rigging

Dragon character skinning for previs.

Modelled a previs version of the main mountain. Both for full shots and the close up climb shot.

Zbrush
-Tests

• Import/export
• Retopologizing
• Normal, Displacement, cavity, and specular mapping
  
• Texture creation and exporting
• UVW
• Projecting high poly mesh details between models (Works pretty well, when done right)
• Texture painting
• Modelling using textures (I.E using a picture of a rock face to create a 3d model of the same)
• Texture tests
  

I have after quite a bit of try and fail figured out how to create models in a non-linear way. One can begin with a simple polysphere and sculpt a character as one sees fit. This works very well for quick 3d sketching, as its quick to sculpt without having to create topology. Also proportions and features are easily changed, allowing testing of many different designs in a short timespan. One can later use Zspheres to create animatable topology.

There are, however several things one needs to be aware of to do this properly, some of these things are not immediately from obvious.

• After creating new topology with Zspheres, be very sure that all verticies are welded, since when you export it, having to weld them in an external package will change the vertex order, thus making imorting the mesh as the base of a multiple sub-d model in zbrush impossible. There are workarounds, but they are timeconsuming. (This may seem obvious, but spotting unwelded verticies can be very difficult when working with zspheres.)
  
• Also, when done creating new topology, append the new adaptive skin as a subtool of the old model. This ensures that the model has the proper scale. If not, Zbrush will employ atandard scaling to the new mesh. Failing to do this willl cause no end of frustration when trying to reimport a UV'ed model back into Zbrush for instance. The Zbrush mesh might very well have a different scale from other tools, and the rescaling toolset is far from good...

Other things to note:

• Zbrush is particular about UVW coordinates. Do them well, and make sure they dont overlap (there is a tool for checking for overlapping UVW's though)
  
• Warning: Zbrush has no automatic save function. Save often and in many files;)
• Likely quite a bit more to come here...
  

Puppetshop rigging

Dragon character skinning for previs.

Modelled a previs version of the main mountain. Both for full shots and the close up climb shot.