Reworking old Dynamo Dream shots (Patreon)

First: an apology- I am SO behind on messages.

But yes! I'm still indulging in the decadence of updating old VFX shots, which I know I shouldn't do, release-schedule-wise, but it feels so good; instead of staring at a blank scene and thinking, "okay lets build everything from scratch" I get to pop in and give younger me's work a once-over of that last 10% using stuff I've learned in the past year.

BEFORE

AFTER. Cleaning up the composite, swapped the sun angle to match the edit, and I totally reworked the monorail car. I did a sloppy UV job with some images from RawPixel (check out their public domain stuff here- they have some total gems. I'm excited to play more with some of the paintings/textures they have), and it really brought it to life. There's also a nice mix of greenscreen and photoscanned folks that I think works pretty well.

The public domain stuff is so rich with culture and detail, it's kind of wild how quickly it can bring stuff to life. I want to be careful, though. Just because you can take an image of someone's culture and slap it on a sci-fi monorail car and say, "yes this is mine now" doesn't always mean you should? One of those good lines to walk.

Also quickly tracked the succulent vending machine into the background of the practical Rotten Dragon kiosk I built a couple years ago. Doesn't really "show off" the model, but I think that's AOK. I think I want to have it next to the jellyfish-in-the-jars shot, so the audience gets a sense of, "oh okay I get it they sell weird stuff that's fun".

I've also had enough folks ask if there's going to be an "art book", and while it seems totally self indulgent and cart-before-the-horse to make an art book for the first episode of a webseries before it's even released, I've got so much content for it (a bunch of sketches and test renders and high res renders and BTS thoughts and all that), so I've started assembling one in Lightroom (gotta make this adobe subscription worthwhile somehow). It's fun, in a very self indulgent way. I think I'm going to release the PDF for free, but have an option if anyone wants to buy one for their coffee table?

This used to be the first shot of the episode, but last night I sat down and sketched out an idea for a window on the back wall. 

I always loved the idea of drawing concept art, but in general I felt it's even easier to conceptualize stuff by just sliding around cubes in 3d space? Lower stakes and easier to experiment when you're not putting ink/lead to page, I suppose. BUT, I think the process of drawing it out actually forced me to think through things in a way I normally don't (or at the very least forced a period of time when I had to). I want to try to do it more often. 

And here's how they look mixed. AND ACTUALLY it's probably a wrong move, in a lot of regards. The bunk room is supposed to be dark and drab, and the window makes it look pretty darn whimsical. But also it's the first shot of the episode, so I think it's alright, because it kind of has this promise of being escapism? Which is really why I've let myself go so over-the-top with this first episode. Even more than the story, I want it to feel like you're visiting this other world for a bit. I blame the quarantine, hahaha! 

There's another aspect that's nagging at me, and it's an inclination I've had to make everything just a little bit bigger and wilder. From a storytelling perspective, if everything's fantastical, then nothing is.  In the case of this episode, I kind of have built in excuses (the town is a sort of historical preserve, kind of a tourist destination, so even in-world they're playing it up a bit), but I want to keep that in mind as we go to other locations. 

Here's another one I gave a rework. Above is the original

And this is the new one. And again you might be looking at them thinking, "huh I prefer the first one actually", and yeah, the first one works better as a still image, but I think the second one works better as a shot. The POV is on a bus, driving past a lot of things, and you can kind of peek the market beyond the obstructions, and it puts you in the perspective of someone on a bus, looking out at the city as you drive by. I think it's hopefully going to make it feel a lot more immersive than a still render I composited steam elements on top of to make it feel "alive". But MOSTLY I just wanted to get rid of those friggin' architectural visualization filler people. 

All that to say, hopefully this is just going to be a nice polishing stage, instead of a wild, "let's redo everything and never release anything" stage. We'll see. If there's one thing the HyperBole proved, it's that I can very happily continue to approach almost finishing something without ever actually doing so.