Creating the Initial Simulation and Developing the Dragon

Anastasia Falce
Mar 10, 2017
2 min read

Hi guys, so, its been a little while since I was on here but I've been up to a lot! Here are some of the things I have done. Remember that these are still very early stages!!

The Animatic:

The first thing that I needed to start doing was to create a city landscape and start making my animatic.

I started off by creating my landscape, as shown above I made the landscape flat initially, intending on creating many trees and environmental features to "beef up" the landscape. Instead I found a much easier way of creating a more interesting and complex landscape using displacement and height maps, creating the interesting "hill and mountain" effect shown above. Using displacement, the original plane, subdivided into many polygons, looks at the height map, shown below, and wherever there is white, it deforms the plane to go up and down, resulting in a hill effect. This was very effective however after created I felt that it would be important to still apply environmental factors such as trees etc to make it look more realistic.

I then went ahead and created a plane that would simulated the lake that the dragon would be resting by initially and the castle that it would be attacking.

So previously I had researched into Greeble and how to use it to create a city landscape. I applied what I had learnt to my initial box of a castle city creating the model shown below. This, I will have to manipulate and add to to make it look like a real castle and city.

I then needed to create my initial animatic, deciding on where to put the cameras, remembering that from my previous talk with Adrian that I needed to think about how I was going to texture my "world" and what would be the easiest angles to do this. Below shows the finished animatic:

Fixing the problem of texturing the landscape:

To work around the texturing problem I have created my animatic so that the shot that shows the overview of the whole environment can be applied with a matte painting behind the simulation of the dragon flying. This will mean that I get to show off my skills with matte painting on Photoshop as well as cut out the problems that would occur from trying to texture such a large scale of the environment.

Developing the Dragon:

Already used to creating and re-doing the dragon, I have carried on this pattern, bettering the model every time. I have found a few good reference images for extra detailing and wing structure, as shown below, that I have been following closely. My next steps continue to be to develop it further and get onto the texturing and rigging stages of modelling.