1/28/15 - Back on the Strugglebus™

It's been about two and a half weeks since my last entry, and I'm proud to say that I finally have a completed forest! It turned out better than I imagined, especially since organic environments are my biggest modeling pothole (with character faces coming in at a close second). Although at this point if I have to paint another tree I might just spontaneously combust.

Here's what I have so far with the forest (this is of course before fancy color correction and post-effects)

The stream-bed is still dry because water hasn't been composited onto it yet (that's my technical director's job).

And here's the overall setup:

I think with how my shots are framed you won't get to see much of the higher foliage/mountains/sky, which is too bad because I spent a good chunk of time painting all of that. :( I also ended up cutting corners with the extra shrubbery by texturing them the same way I did for my previous film: create plane -> subdivide -> 'puff' out flat geometry using soft select -> slap on a flat painting of fauna -> adjust to give illusion of 3D or make duplicates to create more volume. It's a fast formula that works every time.

So with about 95% of my texturing and modeling out of the way I can finally concentrate solely on animation, which I swear I've been doing. I have to get at least 50% of my animation done in 4 weeks for my thesis rough cut so in my next blog post I promise I'll show some characters actually moving.

Lord give me strength.