And its done!

This is my final blog entry.

This blog may not be the most comprehensive one as i chose to spend more time actually producing stuff than blogging. All the stuff i have made should be in here in some form or another, along with some comments. I haven't posted every little problem i faced and choice i made as we neared the deadline, as i was running dozens of test solutions, and barely remember half of them myself. In any case a few sample problems are in here.

Hey, we made it.

Happy vacationings!

Main mountain

This is the high polygon version of the mountain which we planned to use in up close shots. We used it for most of the shots however, since the high poly model has a far better silhouette. Some troubles arose when seeing the mountain very close in the climb shot and at the top of the mountain, since its so huge as opposed to the characters its hard to get enough detail into one bump and normal map. In retrospect it would have been better to split it up into several parts, using 4096x4096 maps to make it look decent up close. For having 13000 polygons and some rather huge texture maps, it seemed to render quite quickly, however.

Animated scenes

Alston has here just landed his plane, and leaps energetically down to retrieve his backpack. He is relaxed but exited, since he has just spotted something of interest on the mountaintop when flying by.




In this shot the dragon is trying to get its bearings, and is annoyed with being trapped in a shell. His vision is also hampered, so he tries leaping up on the edge of the nest to get a better vantage. He then looses his balance and falls down, letting out an annoyed cry.

SOMETHING I JUST NOTICED: In the finished movie, there is a choppy glitch in the animation at the end of this shot. This does not appear here, and i can then happily attribute that mistake to our compositing guy =D



In this shot Alston walks up to the mountain, appraising it carefully whilst tweaking his grand mustache.





Alston is here climbing up the mountain, and is about halfway through the climb. His mustache snags on a branch, and he slips and falls backwards whilst trying to pull free. Luckily his mustache hangs on long enough for Alston to angle in and grab a hold of the branch.

Rig choices

I suggested using the puppetshop rig, and after a bit of testing we chose to use it for both characters. The reason being that it can be made to fit just about any sort of character, animation is transferable between rigs, easy to animate, and has very few bugs.

Puppetshop is a free rig made by Lumonix and can be found at http://www.lumonix.biz All the main functions are described in videos at the site.

Short rig/skin demo for the behind the scenes video:

Character design choices

Note: More on the design can be seen on Anders blog, as the was the one doing the concepts

The dragon was given a big head, big eyes, small wings and rather round body to make it look young. The colors where chosen to fit with its natural habitat, though with a bit more saturation and stronger hue to make it stand out more. We went with rams horns to give it a more distinctive silhouette, and other dragons in references also had horns similar to a ram.

Alston is a middle aged/old man. As such we gave him a potbelly and pulled his pants up over it, as old men have a tendency to do. I exaggerated this a bit more than in the original design i think, even going to the point of giving him an old mans ass (hopefully the last time I'll be modeling that, yep). The mustache is his i think gives him the most character, and was made rather oversized to give him a good silhouette, and also to prove a detriment when climbing.

Finalizing blog

Was going to update some WIP's and final animations before anything else, but the 3dsmax license system is down (and has been since friday evening). Gonna upload what i have lying around but it will be fairly unorganized.

Starting with final version renders of character models.