Thesis - Shot 2

Here's my current progress on the thesis. I changed the storyboard a little bit and instead of having the camera do a long spinning descent from the top of the tower into the interior, I decided to just have side scroll to avoid having to deal with too much extra detail. Over all this shot took 11 individual paintings to complete along with a 3D set up. The 2nd shot of the thesis has been by far a big challenge for me because there were so many technical problems along the way. Although at first I thought that this technique was some kind of dream trick that allowed me to do anything I imagined, I soon realized it had limitations. In the beginning I planned to have Tiger's head in the shot and the camera would pan sideways across its head. But I realized that this was almost impractical due to the amount of time it would take me to model a surface for the projection and painting the tiger texture from multiple angles. The ears of the tiger became a big issue because for it to look fully projected as the camera slides across, I would need to break apart the model into smaller parts and draw textures for left side and the right side of the ears, not to mention there are two ears and a whole face to worry about. So the solution I came up with is to get rid of the head all together. Instead, I just had the tiger's body in the shot and thankfully that was manageable. Still, modeling a mock up of a donuts shape and then painting in two sets of textures from different angles was not as easy as I imagined it to be.

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Another thing I had trouble with is the discontinuous work flow. So far my workflow for projections have been 1) building a primary 3D set up from a sketch, 2) drawing in basic forms to fill the environment, 3) camera test, 4) painting in final details, 5) repeat 3-5 until everything is filled. This allows me to make sure each projections works properly but since I had to paint in everything by parts, keeping the color work together as a whole was a challenge. This shot took me almost 2 weeks and it probably took too long considering the amount of time I have left to finish this project. So far I would like to have at least 1 shot a week. I have around 23 shots total so I might be in a bit of trouble if I want to get this done by May. I'm just hoping that some shots wont take as long and that I would get faster. If worst comes worst, I may have to cut down a few shots and make a shorter animation. I hope I won't have to do that. Crossing fingers.