Bog Updates

After getting some amazing feedback from Susan and Lipin, I have updated my bog to have more depth and more solid ground planes. I looked at some great references I was recommended, especially Sky the game which Susan suggested. I’d never known about ground planes before (or done a whole lot of landscape work in general) so this was really interesting to learn about.

First I tried to break down the ground planes in my shot to understand what was happening. I realized after doing this that everything looked very clunky and unappealing. I then looked at a screenshot from Sky and tried to break the image down in the same way- to work on understanding how ground planes work and how they could vary in number and shape in a scene. This was a really beneficial exercise and I saw where I was going wrong. My first attempt at fixing my planes looked way too round and gave the impression that the shot was really hilly, so I looked at various landscape paintings and my reference photos of the moors to see how things flattened out. This was progress, but I was still having some issues with balance in the image and how my characters would fit into this scene. Susan helped me here with an illustration that made things much clearer and also made me notice some other things about my shot that could be tweaked to improve it, such as the angles of the rocks.

2D Art Progress

The past few days I have been working on producing the final drawings for my film. Some of these have several frames of animals, which are lineless to match my main characters – this has been a deviation from what I had originally planned, but just seems to be how my 2d works better with the 3d shader. I wish that I had finalized the designs of the animals in this style earlier, as it’s taking abit of time to modify my designs like this. I am also using overlays on top of the arnish moor man’s clothing, which keeps a nice texture present on the charactesr so they don’t feel overly flat against the livelier background.

This stage has actually been really helpful for someshots I was struggling with lighting while I was in Unreal – looking at them from a 2D perspective instead of all 3D has made me realiise things I had missed or would like to include. For example, in the shot with the birds nest, I wasn’t sure how to naturally light it. I didn’t just want it to look like the eggs were glowing, but I did want them to be the brightest thing in the shot, as they’re the thing that drives the conflict. I realized that I could just have a strip of light leading up to them, as if he has just naturally followed this light with his eyes and it's landed right on the eggs.

The background render for this shot in Unreal was initially horizontally flipped, but I changed it as I wanted to give the impression that the clouds were rolling in from the left hand side. This also meant that the dark silhouette of the bird stood out more from the background.

Here is some of my reference for this as I’ve worked through these shots:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V03IaOi4A4o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31yu6GSblPs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM2bC6qNksM

Colours

Susan encouraged me to make a colour script, which I've found really helpful for working out the story and how to explain it. It's also shown me where I have shots that aren't needed. I looked a lot at the colour scripts for Brave as well as this website:

https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar/art-of-lighting/introduction-to-virtual-lighting/v/colorscripts

Which has been incredibly helpful- just the entire process of lighting and thinking about colourscripts to tell a story has helped me improve my development of shots.