Narrative Project: Environemnt Refining and Mapping

   With some of the sound refinement completed I looked into tightening up the model of the ravine. Some final tweaks merely to make things a little easier come the later stages. This included adding more crags (it was suggested to me that given the harshness of rock and the concept art we might be able to use an unsmoothed model),

  I had thought about keeping the ravine floor smoothed. The material could have been sand that was blown over the ledges by the ocean current and settled on the floor, depositing itself unevenly down below. This could also act as  rooting material for some of the plants, as sand is easier to push roots into than rock.

   The lattice deformer tool was used to give the ravine floor a rise on the ends, while an accompanyinglattice near the surface was used to give the sense that the split was more extreme in terms of elevation nearer the centre. This will allow the connecting part of the floor to better sync with any ground plane extension we use

 I removed some of the geometry along the ledges as it was giving some slightly odd shapes in the shader engine that did not feel natural. While also tweaking some of the vertex positions to smooth transitions.

  Finally I created some workable UV maps for the various surfaces. Because of the sheer scale of the model I had to resort to cutting up the UV maps not just to fit them on the UV square but also to ease the rendering times as it will allow us to use smaller texture maps.

  Perhaps an alternative when it comes to rendering is to create two models. The seabed will be out of focus or distant so we may be able to get away with a small-ish texture map. But the ravine walls there could be two maps - high-resolution and low-resolution, each on their own separate model that we key to alternate depending on the camera distance. But this might involve more maps and more cutting up.

Ravine bed

 

left-hand wall

right-hand wall

Ledt-hand ravine floor

right-hand ravine floor

Narrative Project: Developing the Ravine Part 4

  I decided to make progress with the ravine, adding some ruggedness to the ledges. Some crags and points have been added but from now on it is going to be more tweaking. Textures such as a bump map will definitely useful from here on out to give the ravine a rockiness to it. The next stage so far will be to do something about how level the ravine floor is. I might taper it at the ends; have the floor rise upwards to indicate a point of origin.

  There could be some more pushing back of the upper ledges, in theory at least. But the main thing that I feel now with the model is I can move on to rocky outcroppings because with the time at hand, I can't risk spending too much time on the tiny details as there is still plenty to do. Plants and rocks are needed for one.

  Perhaps the area around the ravine is also extended. To get the effect these were displaced chunks of rock, instead of relying on further tweaking the angle of the ledges, I also changed the incline of the ground around the ledges to make a more defined incline.

  In terms of scale there is still plenty of space, although most of the action might be away from the ends of the ravine. But this is yet to take into account how much space will be used by rocky outcroppings. Which will be the next phase after adjusting the height of the ravine at each end.

Narrative Project: Development of the Ravine

  Today I looked into some progress with the ravine, the main location for the events in the narrative animation. This went though a couple of iterations as it initially got very complex, so I looked into some advice into how I could simplify the design. For this I went largely back to basics with the shape. Speaking with a first-year the thought occurred of giving the ravine more space in the middle, in order to give the camera and the fish room to move about without an ever-present opening above.

  There is still a little more work to do with this. As I might give the ravine floor more depth and see what I can do with the ravine mouth. But the important part right now is the bowels of the ravine, as that will be where the second fish spends most of its time.

   The concept art I am working from included rocky outcrops, another thing that could be added to give us room to work. It would also give a platform for plant life as the thing about a ravine is it is a very steep drop to the bottom and there might be little place for plants to settle and grow. Developing this will be my next step. The other thought was closing off the ends, especially as that is what the ravine does on the surface, and right now it seems a little jarring that where the crack is closing, the tunnel is just as wide as it is in the middle.

  To get a sense of scale I brought in some of the blocked out plants of the last version of the model and set them somewhere. The fish will be smaller than these so the camera could find itself very close to the walls.

Narrative Project: Blocking out the Ravine

  With roles organised the project goes ahead full steam. We have a project framework folder and my task so far is to create the environment we will use to stage our animation. We agreed that for the sake of design and continuity that we would build only one scene that we would use for the entire animation, so the action of both fish will be rendered an animated from one location. This might also make the use of render layers more important.

  This is only a blockout. Over the coming weeks my plan is to refine the shapes so that we can get a much more naturalistic appearance without the render preview turning the whole thing into mush. Vlad agreed to work on the orthographs so more detailed plants will come later. But for now the priority is the structure of the ravine itself.

  After an initial draft design I talked with the group on how the design could be improved and I agreed on a couple of key changes based on group feedback: The first is that the ravine needs to be deeper. This will give our fish more time to swim up to the mouth of the ravine form the bottom.

  The second is that the ravine could be wider so that it does not feel so claustrophobic and gives more freedom for the camera. Understandable but the need could be further investigated by using a  basic shape such as a sphere to get an idea of how big the fish will be in our scene.

The start is promising. The feedback on the arc was positive but perhaps the ravine could be a little more jagged at the mouth. This is a crack in the seabed, probably cut out with tectonic movement or ocean currents, so rough edges are to be expected.

  From a ground-level perspective yes, maybe the ravine could be a little deeper. Although a camera-eye view could be worth testing out to see if that does anything ot the feeling of claustrophobia. The fish might end up tiny anyway..