Since my last post, I've participated in SKILLS USA District Competition in Beaumont. Syphon (the dragon) did a good job, and now he's going to state competition. So, with that in mind, I'm expanding the storyline to incorporate more of the storyboard I created at the beginning of this project. Everything's going pretty smoothly. The fireball has been created and animated. It looks really cool--more like a comet than an actual fireball, but that works even better, since the fireball goes really fast. In fact, I had to make a tail on the fireball because it went too fast for the camera to follow. The only hard part is figuring out how to make the "comet-tail" dissipate further. I'll work on that later.

What I'm actually doing right now is making trees for my exterior landscaping. At first I tried visors, but my file is already humongous and the visor trees just slow it down even more. After deleting the trees several times, since they slowed me down and also didn't cover the edge of my grass, I went into Alias Mudbox and sculpted a tree stump and a bush. These overloaded my computer when I imported them into Maya 2010, and after two days of attempting to incorporate them into my landscape and failing utterly, I resorted to my tactic from last year in constructing trees. I'm using cylinders with bark texture and bump maps for the trunks and basic cones for the "leaf" part of the tree. Since I want an evergreen forest, this actually works really nicely. I'm just trying to find the right texture for my leaves now.


But so far, I've had my dragon animated so that he flaps his wings, hisses, spits a fireball/comet, lashes his tail, squints, lifts his foot, cocks his head, moves his neck like a serpent, etc. I don't have him moving around yet, since I've only gotten to the part where the camera runs away, but I'm about to work on that after I finish my trees.

ALSO, I made a hand for my camera. I sculpted it in Mudbox, and put it in my storyline during the view of the gems and also when the dragon shifts positions in his sleep (as if scared/surprised). This, thankfully, didn't overload my program and cause it to shut down randomly. It just makes the preview really slow.