My home In Forres
It didn’t take long for me to come up with an idea for a destination. I have always loved the lush green forests as depicted in the works of studio ghibli and works subsequently inspired by them. Before moving to London I was always just a short walk to get away from my obsessive use of technology, in Scotland it was “Beecraigs” and in England, it was “The New Forest” and despite these places being man-made you still felt a strong “spiritual” connection to these places evoking thoughts of the faerie, wisps and The Gruffalo. Now finding myself missing that and altho quite ironic maybe by using this style of the location I might be able to relive that itch and express these themes that I hold dear. I hope to use more fantasy elements to really make the Destination “Perfect”.
Forrest Stream Floating Island
I started out planning my Maya Animation by collecting images to create an inspiration board that I might late use and modify for a reference board (being more specific and giving multiple angles) It’s very pleasant browsing the web for these images I have found many artists whose work I still follow through this process. I made an effort to not only find images of the terrain but with a slight emphasis on things to create motion like water flow, a campfire perhaps and fauna like Deer, Otters, Fireflys, fish and birdlife. I’m happy to take creative liberties in mixing fauna and flora from different parts of the world as
Using Quill I sketched out some models of Foliage like a couple of variants of Pine trees. My 1st attempt ended up rather messy and ugly where I had tried to create detail down to the needles on the tree however this increased the room for error and ended up hard to manage and rather memory intensive so on my second attempt I was far more focused on conveying the shape and silhouette of a tree rather than creating vast detail that when in Maya could be added with textures. I also created an even simpler tree that could be used in the background to allow quicker render times whilst being far from the camera.
Quill let duplicated and hand place trees into a scene I made from gutar pick shped strokes. this is where quill shines as I could shrink myself down in VR and quickly get an Idea of the scale of my scene this led to changes like moving floating islands further into the backgroud aswell as scaling them up and exstending the length of the river mouth.
I imported the terrain I created into Maya however the topology of the scene was really only useful to trace and as a scale reference. I started to trace the ground and water plains with Nurbs and converted them to polygons.