Ground texture（seamless）

Paper Dragon Head Turnaround

Shows off the paper much better than the previous render. Please excuse the dire modelling.

Full screen and HD for best effect.

   

Some more paper town testing..

Paper tests, this time procedural textures and luminance maps for fake illumination and windows. Geometry is very simple - its a step forward, but building style still needs nailing I think!

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

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