Going Live: Camera Layout.

I've been finalising the camera moves and layouts for shots 1 and 2 to pass off to the animators. Shot 3 is pretty much unchanged however.

Going Live: Latest compositing test.

I've been messing around more with the compositing and it's really starting to take shape. The textures, rigging and animaiton are all coming along nicely so I've got plenty to play with. I also applied the normal maps to the textures and it's working very well. 

I've added some camera effects such as grain, bokeh, chromatic abberation and flares to try and remove it from the overly CG look and it's getting there... definitely needs more work though.

Going Live: Normal Maps

I've been investigating creating normal maps from photography to enhance the procedurally generated textures within Maya. I photographed different levels of crinkled-ness to give us a small library of options for the final outputs.

I initially tried creating the maps in photoshop but was having some bizarre issues despite following the tutorials exactly, so I investigated further and found a program called "crazybump" which does a greta job of generating normal/bump/displace/cavity maps from images.

Going Live: Early compositing look dev.

No textures, quick lights, bare minimum render passes... just playing around really.

Going Live: Final Dragon Model.

Finished the dragon model! I'm pretty happy with the result and can't wait to see it animated.The rest of production is coming along smoothly and we're making decent progress. I've also started experimenting with rendering and compositing to test the look of the film.