Production
Production
Modelling
The production stage, I must say, was the most annoying part due to lots of improvement needed to be
met from countless of feedback and tutorials. My mistake when I started with this stage was modelling
first before animation. I only did this because I wanted to create better layout of the staging before I
started animating – that way I would know where I could place my character/creature with all the props
surrounding them. Firstly, I went back to my concept art of the crystal palace and started with that and
it did not take long as I have obtained quicker experiences of modelling from the previous years of my
course. Then I started texturing everything using blinn shaders and bump maps. However, the low poly
model of the Crystal Palace did fall to pieces as most of the meshes I made were not labelled and are
combined when they should be grouped. When I had tried to sort it out, the textures vanished so I started
all over again using the object I exported to Headus UV, then assigning the shaders again. One thing I
learnt during this part was to keep everything neat so that my collaborators when they render my scene
with lighting would not have problems encountering any errors.
At the same time I finished the model of the Crystal Palace, before I realised I made errors in that scene,
I created the houses and again had the same problem with how organised my scene was. What I learnt
from my mistakes from the previous scene of the Crystal Palace, I corrected into the scene of the houses
and labelled them to keep them neat. Then I started laying out all the buildings into one scene using
references to help follow my storyboard of where and what is happening in that scene. I created two
scenes, the street and the town square. The street never made it to the final cut as I scrapped off the
storyboard with bear as a shapeshifting creature, but I kept the town square where the bird is introduced
before spotting the glowing crystal in greed. To model the town square took a lot of time as I realised
that few things were missing such
as the lamppost, gears, awnings at
the front of the houses and the
walkway leading into the Town-
hall where the girl lives. I used the
time I had left to create all that and
put it into the scene.
(Fig. 14)
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