Change of focus

First, I'll quickly go over some of the research I've been doing over the past week or so. With the last week of previz hanging over my head, I tried to squeeze in as much research as possible. My main areas of research:

-psychology and motivation for wanting to make a dragon
-fantasy as a genre
-dragon physiology

This research will probably continue into the next few weeks or so as I continue to prune my story and develop my characters. These next two weeks are slated for character design, and I'm going to try to stick as closely to my production schedule as possible. At least until the animation part, that is.

Because, as the title of this entry indicates, I have had a change of focus. I talked to Boaz Livny and he flat out told me my story was too long, character animation or otherwise. I told him I was more interested in the effects and he said, as an extreme, I could even just have the final ingredient drop go in and the dragon come out, and keep my thesis to those four shots or so.

The next day I had my Previz presentation to Myles Tanaka, Mike Cushny, and Gavin Guerra, who echoed that my story was long (although I indicated I was looking for ways to prune the story). Myles suggested I didn't even have to show my Billy character, but I think Billy is needed to connect with the audience. I don't think my effects will be strong enough to capture the audience from start to finish, and even if they are I do want the audience to connect to the piece on an emotional level rather than purely a sensory level.

Gavin directed me to choose my focus, specifically the effects that I wanted to show. At this point I have the bubbling cauldron effect, the drop effect, the embryo forming effect, the dragon out of liquid effect, and the fire effect. The most difficult, I feel, will be the dragon out of liquid effect, and I feel like I want to rise to the challenge and take on that as my main money shot. In that spirit I have begun to research Realflow and other possibilities for fluid simulation. It's too bad I probably won't have access to something as advanced as the PhysBAM algorithm that ILM's Zeno uses, and in any case I don't really have the processing power for it either. Realflow seems like a good solution, as I've seen some decent simulations from Realflow pieces. Realflow, however, like Maya Fluids, tend to look very syrupy, but that's a problem of most fluid sim programs. Zeno is the only program I've seen overcome that problem; the waves in the remake of the Poseidon seem realistic enough to me.

Gavin told me to avoid the ocean shader for my well since there wouldn't really be a current / waves on the surface. I will need ripples instead, which means a lot of softbody dynamics. Boaz also suggested that the dragon's wings might need softbodies and/or cloth to look correct.

The drop effect that Billy has (pouring the final ingredient into the well), was problematic to both Boaz and Gavin because it was a big effect for almost no payoff. Boaz suggested that I hide Billy's hand and just have a sound effect and a ripple in the overhead shot.