Work today...

Today I spent most of the morning and afternoon developing new ideas for train shaders and perhaps textures.  However, I think we've decided we are going to go with shaders for the train mainly due to the complexity of the unwrapping process!  I'll post some screen shots on in my next post.

I've also spent tonight thinking about the toy trains, as I've not really done much in the way of concepts/designs for them.  All we agreed on is that they will be simpler versions of the real train and maybe with some nice wood shaders.  Aaron has found some good shaders and I've been continually hunting for more and looking at tutorials on creating custom shader networks.  Thank you Lee Lanier for 'Advanced Maya Texturing and Lighting'!


Here's the rust texture shader network I used.

It's just noise.

*I've got rid of this now...it's horrible!

Train carriages and more clouds

These are the modeled train carriages, that are from my concepts.  I've also tried out some textures, which I'm a becoming a little jaded with as I'm struggling to get the results I visualise in my head.  However, I'm positive I'll get a good result with persistence.


And, the clouds.  These images aren't the quality that they will show in the final film as I've set them to show in PAL widescreen, so they appear squashed on here.

Final designs of the imp's room

The Imp's cave bedroom!

This is yet to be finished, but shows current progress of the sky background but needs more buildings and a street below!

This one is getting to more where I imagined it would!  I got some advice from our group director and added some more clouds- seems to frame it better.  I also added a faint view of the street below as there is a layer of cloud above.

First few concepts of the Imp Express

View street- people and cars waiting at crossing

I became highly influenced by some images of 1920/30s American stream trains and came up with concept for the train. 

For the images visit:  http://cruiselinehistory.com/?p=233

These were the initial designs I came up with during the first few weeks of working on the 'Imp Express'.  I had a few styles in mind at the time, but chose to look at film- noir and a 1930s design, with small fantastical elements to highlight the surreal parts to the story. 

I also did these before we had any idea of the style we were heading towards!