feather placement

Been working more on the feather placement on the head.

This time I've segmented the dragons head when creating the hair to make the curves. Then I've added different lengths for the hair so that the hair is shorter at the snout than it is at the back of the head. However all the feathers have the same width because its using one hair system. I may have to use several hair systems with different widths to get even more variation. I'm also going to have to hand draw the curves around the snout and eyes because I can't place them properly with gravity.

Modelling

I've also been modelling;

So far I've pretty much finished the dragons head, I just have to make eyeballs.

Same with Phoebe's head, it's pretty much done except I need to finish her hair and give her some ears.

 I've also started on her body;

more feather tests

Been working out how to place the feathers on the dragons head which I want to do using nurbs curves.

I've tried the method of drawing the hair straight onto the dragons face via this tutorial;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5L50ETOhc4

However this takes too long and I found that because I hadn't modelled most of the feathers on the model that I had the curves were flat on the surface of the dragon. I centred the pivot on all of the curves and then rotated them but they stuck a bit too far into the head of the dragon.

Another method I tried was using a script called dodomaster which worked very well but I found that I couldn't freeze transformations or delete by type history because the location information of the nurbs was attached to a locator(or something, hard to explain).

The latest method I've come up with with some success is to create a hair system on the dragon then change the gravity so that it goes in the same direction as the length of the head of the dragon. Then I put some start curve attract on the hair and start to playblast it. The hair starts to curve like a feather so I pause it to where I like and delete by type history and then delete the hair system. Then I rinse and repeat with different lengths to get some variation.

I've also tried randomly selecting these curves and creating several hair systems so that I can have some feather colour variations, as unfortunately one hair system only lets me have one colour for a feather

The result looks like this;

There's still lots of work to do; There are offending feathers that intersect, I'm thinking that I'll delete the feathers/nurbs that offend then start again

Another problem is that the feathers are too large on the snout and around the eyes. I might have to select certain faces(like around the nose and eyes and mouth) and create a hair system with shorter hairs as opposed to creating nurbs across the whole head like I've done previously.

The colour experiment was a partial success, I've actually got too much variation. Next time I'm gonig to vary the feather colours but they'll all be variations on the green.

Feather tests

Been trying out feathers in maya. I made them using paint effects converted to polygons which are attached to an nhair system(or using this tutorial on youtube; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXVRGC15gtQ)

The feathers look dull because I haven't sorted out the specular maps yet.











Here's my testing, the last two I was trying to make the feathers stand on end, did this by keyframing gravity.

Boards for sizzle reel

Just for my own personal organisation, its useful to have all the boards together for quick reference

Sizzle reel animatic

Have created a sizzle reel animatic that contains the centre of my film. I still need to tinker with the timing a bit as the start goes too fast in some areas. It is just under 3 minutes long but I can always cut out the first scene because while it is interesting, it still probably isn't as interesting as the dragon scenes.

I'm thinking that that will be my back up plan if I find that I can't get the full 3 minutes done. This is good because it means I'll have certain scenes as a priority. I'll get the prioritised scenes done and if I still have time then I'll start on the other scenes. If by some miracle I get both done on time then I can start making the rest of the assets for the film(Unlikely)

After finalising the timing of the animatic I'll go on to shot breakdowns and asset lists. I still need to make myself a schedule too, I want to give myself 3 or 4 weeks just for the rendering which means I'll have to move fast

What I'm up to now as well as old work

Currently I'm drawing up orthographics for all the characters for later modelling, I'll be done with that today. Otherwise I'm going to decide what scene's I'm using for my sizzle reel. Once I do that I'm going to make a list of assets I have to make. Once that's done I think I'll start modelling those assets but at the same time I will also start breaking down the rest of the shots, giving them numbers and names and asset lists so that everything will be prepared for next year when I animate the rest of the film.

Here's old work when I was trying to work out the design for phoebe