Tag: look dev

It’s! 9 to 15 Feburary 2015’s Flying Circus.

I’ve already written a bit about freaking out in rewrite hell on Saturday and storyboarding with Blender’s shiny new Grease Pencil features on Tuesday. Today instead of blocking out The Sequence That Isn’t Going Anywhere I decided to do some long overdue look dev for the desert setting of “A moment in the sun”.

My real life reference for the desert is the semi-arid scrubland around Cue and Meekatharra in the Midwest region of Western Australia. Examples: Cue Lookout; more Cue Lookout; Walga Rock; more Walga Rock; desert flowers; Wanna Munna; Nannine Park. Except even more inhospitable-looking. I love the reds and greens and greys and straw colours of the desert.

I’d go and take a look for myself except it’s about six hours of driving each way. 🙂

Rather than hopping into Krita and painting, I threw together a couple of particle systems and played with the colour and size of those until I found something I liked. Long-ago set dressing knowledge gleaned from Blender Guru’s still nifty Nature Academy course combined with Cycles’ Object Info > Random plugged into a ColorRamp node came in very handy. (Check the screenshot for the geometry and node setup.) I’m personally keen on the finer gravel – looks more floodplainy – but Award-Winning Production Designer Friend likes it coarser.

I did a mockup of a shot from earlier in the week rendered in scope ratio instead of widescreen as a test. I’m not thrilled with how photoreal it’s looking – I want to give it more of a visual opinion instead of outright copying what nature does. Eh, it’ll come. 🙂

And if I get tired of making pretty pictures, there’s always figuring out how to rig Pointy so he has the same range of expression that I’ve been putting on him in the boards. Or figuring out why Gronky’s rig is breaking when it’s linked these days.

It’s a big project and there’s always something to do. Even if that means playing with Blender’s nightly builds because screen space AO/DOF and Pointiness in Cycles are fun and they’ll be in a stable build before too long anyway. Part of the Blender user experience – especially when an Open Movie is in production – is keeping up with all the nifty new features.

That’s all for now.