Encounter 3/Prequel - Environment WIP (Patreon)

Next to Chloe and another mini animation I've also been working in a new environment where Encounter 3 and it's upcoming prequel will take place. This is going to be quite a change in setting, as we're taken away from the lush forests and into an Egypt-inspired desert landscape!

There's still a lot of work that has to be done here, but I'm mostly done with the blockout of the sandy landscape! The building to the front left will be the main location where most of it takes place, where in the pyramid and oasis serve as the backdrop. There's still going to be a bit of vegetation around the oasis itself, but for this week I'm going to be focusing on the main building on the left, as it needs both a decent in- and exterior!

So far this is the progress of roughly one week of work with most of the rough layouting being done! The hardest part is probably going to be the main temple on the left since it's going to need a lot of custom modelling work. I'm still taking some shortcuts by implementing some kitbash stuff for background buildings, props, and other stuff, so here's hoping I can get the environment done until the end of August.

In terms of scale it's probably the biggest environment yet, but it was required to be this large due to there being very little vegetation to obscure things.

I sadly didn't get any progress in on Chloe's fur due to hitting a roadblock with the fur plugin I've been using. After making the last post, I was about to have her fur tested in a test animation, but it was terribly unstable and flickered whenever she was moving. I've been in touch with the support, but they've not been able to help me with the issue. Over the recent week I've been trying various settings and came to the conclusion that I might have to abandon Ornatrix altogether and give Yeti a shot instead. Not only is it developed exclusively for Maya, but it's also been around longer, has much better documentation and tutorials, and a supposed premium support for studio license holders. 

The bad news is that I have to remake the fur from scratch with software I have no experience with, but I already bought a fairly extensive workshop that I'll be going through tomorrow. Luckily I've made texture maps for all the fur parameters, so a lot of them can be reused to quickly get back to the result of the last post.

So yeah, bit of an in between update, but there's still decent progress with the environment! Note that I'll also have a new stomach mini animation that will be posted at the end of this month. (: