Eagle Rig

Just a quick and late post about the eagle rig:

Top view:

Bottom View:

Top View with joints:

Top View with an awkward test of the rig potential:

Side View with joints:

 Side View with a less awkward test of the rig potential:

Shot 1 Animation

The animation I have been working on is in Shot 1. The Tree unravels as a hand, follows and shoots up through the flying eagle, as if to grab it. The eagle is knocked out and starts falling, before it transforms into a dragon and flies past the camera, sweeping to the next shot.

Tree-Hand animation:

Eagle fall and transform animation:

Dragon transform and sweep animation:

Here is a video with all the characters together. The eagle and dragon animation overlap to allow the compositors to blend between them for the transformation. I've put it on X-ray view so the eagle and dragon can still be seen. I also animated the camera for this shot:

I've also uploaded these playblasts to vimeo, the quality is slightly better to view over there instead of on blogger. The password for the videos is 'GoingLive':

Tree-Hand: https://vimeo.com/92246473

Eagle: https://vimeo.com/92246472

Dragon: https://vimeo.com/92246471

All together, X-ray view: https://vimeo.com/92246470

- Lilly

Eagle flight animation, Sc1

Here's a playblast of my animation of the eagle flying at the start of scene 1. Sorry for the hyperlink, can't work out how to embed vimeo in blogger posts.

Eagle Design

This is the semi-rough character design of the eagle, on which John M. based his 3D model. It is essentially a mixture of elements from our initial eagle designs. I just sketched all the elements together on a sheet.

Character Concepts

Done some character concept sketches for the Eagle and the Dragon, then I took them into Photoshop to test some paper textures and colours...

Parchment colours:

The Eagle on the left I made darker and had fiery golds shining through (as the Eagle is "corrupted by Morgoth" and goes through flame and sorcery to become a dragon):

Light parchment colours, was experimenting with how to make them look similar, as the Dragon morphs from the Eagle:

Experimented with adding flecks of foil gold to the paper texture as this is Smaug The Golden:

Tried a slightly cooler hue as I wondered if the paper Dragon might blend into the parchment-like map background too much in the film, depending on the final look of the background environment:

Turned up the contrast to experiment with the foil gold texture, kind of looks like fire on the surface of the dragon now:

- Lilly

Rough Character Designs

Here are two rough character designs, one for the dragon and one for the eagle:

 I tried to make a nice body shape for the dragon, and I tried to make his head shape to look like the Smaug's head, from the film (big jaw, similar horns, etc). But I didn't spend much time to the wings.

On the eagle, I tried to make his wings to look nice, while I made some other body parts (head, legs) not to imitate folded paper.