Week 6-8

I've now made the environment that will appear in the intro shot and later in the animation from a low angle. I started by making the volcano and coastline nearby:

I then made some very basic buildings, boats, and docks for the town (they'll be shown so far away that any detail beyond their use as a light source is unnecessary.

Here the town is with the volcano in the background.

I then made a lower poly environment for the surrounding area along with a flat plane for the surface of the sea:

 

I added a sky dome and layers of semi-transparent fog to fade the distance out and replicate the look of the main animation sequence:

 

Here's a render of the result - I'll play with the lighting once I know the exact appearance of the sky in the main sequence (it'll probably be a bit brighter):

There are also several quick lava closeups in the plan (shot 2 and shot 6 on the plan). For these I made a small set with multiple background layers and some fog:

 

The lava surface is a plane with darker textured shapes for rock chunks.

There's also a 2D tree in the background (I made a few of these which I'll use in the main sequence). Here's one of the frames from one of the two final sequences:

I made a little lava spew too which is just a few 2D shapes which i then morphed and animated, to keep in style with the style of the rest of the animation:

I've also made the character and horse rigs in 2D, excuse the dots they're the pivot points:

While the horse is a single asset the man is split up into limbs (I wanted to get as much detail as I could):

I based his head on the design of ancient Greek and Roman coins. His mouth can open and he can blink too, but I doubt I'll need to use these as I've really gone into more detail here than I needed to.

Here the final figure is:

Finally, I've started editing the video. I've imported the song and inserted placeholder frames that fit in with the beat. The red ones represent frames where the horse's hooves are on the ground, the green where they'll be in the air. The start of each 12 frame loop happens with each beat (necessitating a frame length of ~0.385 seconds for the rider animation loop), so the final gallop will happen to the music.

I'm basing the animation itself on Muybridge's 1878 horse gallop frame study, though I'm augmenting it a little to have the horse in the air for a slightly longer period. This will distance it from strict realism and will be in keeping with the rest of the animation, as well as fitting better to the beat and being more pleasing to the viewer (while real horses are in the air for about 35% of each sequence when moving at full speed, my horse will be in the air 50% of the time).