For week 6-8, I took on the feedback that was given to me to change everything to a higher poly more detailed environment. The models were changed to a much higher poly.

This is the changed site map and this is a test render for the setup of the environment. The changed models involved changing them from low poly to high poly.

The process involved changing the level of curves, adding displace from the modifier and changing the amount, I also added turbosmooth and increased the irritation to add more segments to the object.

However, it was not that easy to reach this level because I went through a lot of trial and error to reach this level. As I previously mentioned I have never mentioned the environment and this is all new to me, therefore a lot of help was required from Amit as well as resources online.

First of all, for the water, I have issues figuring out what how I wanted to do it and I thought of using phoenix fd which is a plugin for 3ds max. It can stimulate water particles, but it is very heavy for my computer. Therefore, in the end, Amit guided me towards space warps which will be used to animate the water.

The mountains and ground were taken into ZBrush to add more details to them and then brought back into 3ds max, however there was an issue that I had to re-topologise the objects which were not the issue, my main issue was the textures did not want to get baked so that I can use it as a texture map therefore in order to avoid this issue as I could not fix it and I was running out of time I decided to use the method that I mentioned above (add displace modifier and change the levels to create mountains and the island as well as the ground plane)

The next step would be to start unwrapping and texture which was done during week 8-10

 

As there were some changes that the other group members had to do it was time to move on to the modeling process of the environment. The modeling process for the environment has been divided between Evan, Carl and myself. Carl did the modeling of the castle, Evan modeled the trees as well as the catapult. I modeled the ground plane, rocks, mountains, grass, an island, and the water.

This was the site map that was originally created but some changes were made to it.

The ground created was by adding a bitmap and changing the levels to create a bumpy ground. This was also how the mountains were created, the water was created by adding a plane and changing the color to blue. The rocks were done by adding noise to the cube, however, the comments that I got on the overall look of the assets that the models are very low poly, simple and no details. The grass was done using hair and fur.

For week 3 and 4, I had to do more perspective drawings of the landscape as the main comments that I got from the presentation was that they know what grass, rocks, and bridge look like, the viewers did not understand how the overall environment looks like. Therefore for week 3 I started drawing perspective drawings for the overall environment (they were quite rough) and then I started to fix the perspective of the drawings up and I colored the objects within the picture even better.

I also looked up perspective drawings of a landscape to try and get a better idea. I also got perspective guidelines to help me draw and get the perspective correct.

 

For the first week of the class, I was not there. I did not participate in brainstorming an idea for the current project but however for week two, I was given some work to do for the pre-production phase of the project (they got the idea approved within the first week of classes).

For the second week of class, I was briefed on the idea and the overall story and I was given the task to draw a couple of shots for the storyboard, draw the concept art and mood board for the landscape.

I first started with gathering some reference images which will be used for the mood board. I wanted to get pictures that represent grass/ sand landscape with no trees as I was worried about the render time. Therefore I used these reference images:

The theme of the animation is a fantasy one. I looked at different bridges that have been in “Disney” movies and I also looked at different fantasy environments.

I then moved onto the next phase which was to complete my part of the storyboard, as  the pre-production pitch presentation was on Wednesday and I wanted to have enough time to do the concept art for the landscape.

I had to draw the shot were the knight is carrying the princess and as he steps onto the bridge, the bridge collapses.

I then moved onto the concept art, I did not draw a lot of sketches of the landscape as I drew objects that were going to be modelled and different variations of the objects.