PREPRODUCTION

Here are some activities which I am doing and I did my in this phase. Although I am running behind the schedule for my project , however I know that to get this phase as accurate as possible in relation to the basic concept of the project will decide the outcome of the project. The major reason for this delay in the project is because I am still not convinced with the concept arts or sketches that will represent the evocation of a place. Unlike a single matte painting shot where one has to focus on a single shot, this entire project would be a sequence of matte paintings thus it became very important for me to prepare and study concepts like colour harmony and storytelling , which are vital for tasks like animation.

To accomplish this I divided the entire activity in to sub tasks for example studying colour and mood of different environments, terrain study, concept arts/storyboard and pre visualization of shots. Some of the concept art work and paintings which I am working on can be found below:

Understanding Tones:

A grey tone painting which I did to understand how tones varies with the distance:

Using different picture mattes for 'A Monastery':

This painting was done to explore the color harmony and power of using small picture mattes to produce a matte painting. Few of the work here for example the bridge is painted and rest are the samples of different pictures:

References are mentioned below:

http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ ; http://www.burningwell.org/; http://backgroundsarchive.com/desktop/nature.php?page=4

Concept arts in Progress:

This is the small waterfall shot which I am working on these days along with other sketches, the idea for this concept artwork is to capture the location of a place which is situated far from the urbanization in nature. The sketch itself is incomplete however my progress can be seen at the below:

One more concept art which is almost complete :

These sketches should be completed in a week.

These are few more sketches which are based on two different environments, the first one is the practice to capture a  mountain covered with snow and intense clouds. 

This second image helped me in understanding reflection and a bit more wild environment. I liked painting this image as it has a nice blend of blue sky reflected by the water source.

There is still some amount of work which needs to be done to decide on the final film color palette for the animation, a sample for the same decision making process can be found below:









Technical Tests:

A small quick set up inside VUE to prepare a rough Terrain with snow:

Hi all,

I completed the waterfall concept art and the main concept (as explained earlier) is captured by introduction of a small architecture in the mid ground which is connected with the bridge to the left side of the terrain. In my opinion the bridge helped me in selling the idea behind the architecture as it makes it quite realistic while keeping it still in isolation from the dense population.I still think that the light set up needs a bit of tweaking to enhance the mood of the picture while doing so the change in the proportion of the small hill with the architecture might help to sell the idea, the finished artwork can be found below:

One more Vue render test while studying different Material Texture and render nodes inside Vue. I quite like Vue's ability to render scene in multiple passes that allows one to render out different image information like alpha channel,depth ,colour information etc, which can later be used later in post production. It took 4 minute to render:

A Thought About Matte Painting Sequence:

After working on concept arts I made a small plan to formulate a sequence for my matte painting. The entire animation would be divided in to four major shot categories starting from a shot which will show a distant place in Himalayas to a close-up shot which will reveal different terrains and other features.
Below is the small description about shots and the content they will represent:

While Following the same Shot sequences I worked on few Concept arts and rough 3D Renders which helped me in visualizing the scene and the scenario a bit better. Artworks and their descriptions produced by me in a week period of time can be found below:

Shot_Sequence_01- A Mountainous Place

This is a rough render from VUE and this helped me in visualizing a place which is situated at a great altitude. I am thinking of making a river right at the bottom of mid mountains which will give it a bit more natural look. Beside this in my opinion the Mid mountain terrain requires slightly different texture-not Brown Of course- as it represents a terrain at some height.

So my options for the mountain texture would be more confined to different variations of Grey colour. Moreover, trees on the mountain on the mid ground are slightly big in size and therefore are in a way of conveying the idea of massiveness.I would like to change the light which right now is very sharp and coming straight from the camera's point of view, changing the position of the light source right in the back ground or behind the left mountain range might help in this case.