For design, I am having Patrick McGlynn do some more concept art for me, because of course one can never have enough. Between mine, Patrick's, Cidalia's, and Jose's, I should have a good sense of my characters and be able to start modeling. I also am planning to do more color tests.
Modeling is going very slowly. I want to model my well pretty soon, I may do that sometime this week, in addition to some of the ingredient bottles. I also want to rig some planes for the page-turning manual. I've got one page turning, debating as to whether or not that's good enough for the 3D animatic.
For texturing, I have some nice images to create bark texture for my trees. It has a color map, a bump map, and even a displacement map. I got the displacement map to work after 15 minutes of forgetting to use alpha offset instead of color offset. Silly me.
Also, I've been doing some experimenting with fluid textures, some ground textures (which will probably double for Donkey Hoti), and I'm thinking about how to handle the sky. I'm currently visualizing stars in a dusk-to-night sky.
Much of my work was spent working on my 3D animatic. I found this really nice rig on highend3D.com called laddoo, a nice kid model. The only problem is there's no instructions, so I basically have to figure out how to animate him myself. The textures also came in wonky with some strange, unknown nodes and some materialInfo nodes. I deleted all that crap and constructed shading networks from scratch. I gave the kid brown hair, pink, somewhat sub-surface scattery skin, blue jeans, and a navy sweater with green stripes. Stylin. Throw in some hair dynamics (yes, his hair is controlled by actual Maya Hair dynamics, very cool), and you've got one slick kid.
Now if I could only find a dragon. Of course, this is all 3D animatic work, so chances are I will probably use very little, if anything, from these files. But who knows, I might like a model or a texture here and there. I definitely think a 3D animatic is well worth it and should be part of my production pipeline. Here's what the environment looks like right now. I've experimented a little with camera composition to see what looks good, basically trying to match my story boards.
