The_Lonely_Mountain

Rough modelling of the lonely mountain for Render Tests with paper texture and lighting.

Animatic V1.0

Here's the initial draft of the animatic. The timing needs tightened up a bit and some of the visuals clarified, but the gist is there! 30 seconds definitely isn't as long as it used to be.

Town buildings..

Concept for town buildings... style and paper surface wip!

Colour ideas

I have been experimenting with some colour palettes and values. Exploring which colours compliment each other, mainly focussing on red, yellow and orange hues for now. I have a looked at parchment paper, colour and values at 5%, just to try and get an early feel of what colours work. I'm not sure why Blogger is uploading it with a purply background it is actually on white (which looks better).

Modeling Ideas for the Dragon

Although we haven't actually done the design proper as yet, I thought I'd try to create a Dragon head to get the ball rolling, and with the idea that someone can use it for texture and lighting testing etc. I have uploaded the Maya file to the facebook page for use, feel free to ask me as well of course, if you want to use it for anything.
So, here are a couple of stills and an mov of the head turn rendered with ambient occlusion:

Paper and lighting test..

A few renders created using Maya translucency and transparency maps, with the burning town in mind.  Area lights were used, to make for soft shadows.  Its all Mental Ray - Ray Traced.  Really just starting the ball rolling, need to play with more 'paper' and lights.  Will look at animating shadows too (silhouettes).  In the top render the paper was triple thickness (best seen around the windows).

thickness closeup

no external light

external area light

projected fire

box test

object blocks light

cutout areas using transparency masks

John Harrison

Map Reveal AE Test

Just a quick map-reveal test done in After-Effects. Would be grand to get something like this in here somewhere.

Storyboard ver.1

Project Board & Paper Dragon

The main project board in the studio is starting to fill up with rough storyboards and moodboards, which different members of the team have contributed to:

Kieran's Hobbit map, which is the original idea source and inspiration for the film, is also up on the wall:

This is a gold paper origami dragon I made yesterday to help with reference for paper textures and possible shapes for the 3D model:

- Lilly

Moodboards

Hobbit Imagery:

Link to 'Hobbit' Pinterest Board

Paper Dragons:

Link to 'Paper Dragons' Pinterest Board

Eagles and Dragons:

Link to 'Eagles and Dragons' Pinterest Board

Illustrated Maps and Landscapes:

Link to 'Illustrated Maps and Landscapes' Pinterest Boards

Fire and Smoke:

Link to 'Fire and Smoke' Pinterest Board

- Lilly

Moodboards

I've put together some mood boards to help create a feel for the aesthetic we were thinking about, just for reference and inspiration, really.

Hope this is helpful.

I also found this, and although it's early days, if we did ever decide to add some 2D animation in there, I thought that something like this style would really work with the map idea.

Vimeo link:

Leonardo