Progression

Having taking the feedback from the block-out presentation on board I now have a clear idea on what direction I need to take and also what I need to focus on however overall everyone liked the idea and the stage of progression that I am at. One thing I need to look into is more camera work everyone felt that the camera was too erratic and there were too many camera shots for the scene and recommend that I have fewer camera shots as it will flow nicer together in the final cinematic. This is very helpful as I will be able to get the best shots of my scene with a more coherent camera fly through.

The first thing that I chose to develop was the opposing mountain range which I will be using in the far distance across the valley which will be seen in the backdrop of some of the shots when the camera is looking from within out to show the sense on size and scale of the whole scene. I decided to look into using the sculpt geometry tool within Maya as I found it to be a quick and easy method in creating a low poly mountain without a large amount of detail on.

I started out with a plane to which I then imported a height map to get the original shape of the mountain, I have decided to use a plane as I will be able to use basic planar mapping for the UV's in which I will then use custom materials within Unreal Engine 4 to create the texture for the mountain.

I then tweaked the vertices on the plane to get a taller mountain as I feel it would fit my scene more to have a very tall, random mountain range. After that I smoothed the edges to make it more organic and lifelike as it had very hard edges which didn't look like a proper mountain.

Following on from this I put the mountain into the engine and duplicated it around to make the whole mountain range while also making sure that I am looking through the camera's to make sure that I cover the whole field of view. I then went onto put a basic material using constant3Vectors and a normal map on the mountain to give it some colour so that I know what kind of atmosphere that I want my scene to have. I want to try and get everything up to the same stage so I am going to concentrate on other area's of the scene so that I don't put off one area to work on another.