Over the past couple of days I have been working on the first scene of my original animation. I have been trying to improve upon the basic slow zoom that I had and lighten up the scene, to give it less of a "trying to hide my work" feel. The image above is a render taken from my improved scene, the environment is now much more noticeable, with a few new additions.
- The terrain has been increased to give the area a more widespread feel
- The egg blends in with the environment now until it splits open, releasing the green glow from within, which is very reminiscent to my older concept art pieces.
- A matte painting has been placed in the background to more detail to the piece, rather then leaving it black like I had originally.
- You can no longer see any floating pieces of rock which was a problem with my original.
This scene is now much longer, totaling up to around 700 frames of the camera panning towards the egg, which is slowly cracking and breaking apart, then zooming up as the glow encompasses the screen.
I wanted to add a bit more animation to the egg, rather then leaving it standing with the occasional bulge outwards, so I decided to look into the Dynamics functions in Maya to see what I could use. I managed to find a shatter feature that splits apart an object in multiple different pieces, like an egg being broken.
Using this on my egg model I managed to create an effect of the alien cracking through the shell, releasing a bright green glow from within.
I accomplished this green glow by creating a sphere inside the egg model and applying a surface shader to it, putting a glow effect on it, leading to the final design that I now have.
A render taken from the egg glow before I dulled it back a bit.
Next I plan on Introducing more of a glow to the tendrils that are coming out of the egg and spreading along the landscape, just to make it a bit more eerie and colorful, instead of leaving it as this darker, rocky environment, then I will be ready to move on and improve the next scenes. A pre vis will be up after it has finished uploading to you tube so that you can see the improvements I have made with the camera and the animation on the egg.
