Final Video

Rationale

I created a designated training area for the vikings to learn to fight with dragons, for the film How to train your Dragon. It depicts what appears to be spacious clifftops surrounded by fog with a chain barrier and elements of viking life. My setting is based post-film, after the vikings of Berk have befriended the night fury and the other dragons. The area caters for both vikings and dragons to practice fighting and train themselves.

The settings for How to train your Dragon reflects the environment during the time vikings existed. Although Vikings originated from Scandinavia, the author of the original novel, by Cressida Cowell, stated that was based on her birthplace in Scotland. This gave me a starting point of consideration for constructing my scene. I based my cliff faces on photographs of Scottish landscapes and the architecture and weaponry on historical paintings of vikings.

The original filmic style was influenced by video game aesthetics whilst maintaining a sense of real life. I tried to mimic a similar style, through realistic geometry sculpture and architecture fused with a sense of surrealism (often evoked from video games) through the position of a sky high cliff surrounded by mist.

To create a scene with a similar style How to train your Dragon, I was constantly referencing different elements, aspects and scenes from the film. For example; I created a stone with inscriptions of training rules and a code of conduct in the old norse for the area, which reflects the stone that protagonist Hiccup writes on when teaching the citizens of Berk about dragons. I also looked closely into the braziers from the opening attack scene of the movie, and replicated those as light sources for my scene. The wood-work and architecture I examined from the bridges in the village of Berk, and the chains from the fighting arena the young vikings used for their examinations.

The camera shots of the settings in How to train your Dragon is similar to that invideo games, giving point of view shot or an establishing shot whenever the viewer is introduced to a new scene. To help reinforce the coexistence of the vikings and dragons, I decided to start with an establishing shot that morphs into a point of view camera shot from a viking rider, without any visibility of the dragon itself. It appears as if the viewer is exploring and examining the area, then flies away into the sky for flight training.

As for music, I chose to use a song from the original How to train your Dragon film soundtrack "Ready the Ships". This song evokes a sense of pride and honour, which I believe suits a training scene. I also added in subtle sounds to give a sense of presence to the setting, for example dragons roaring when passing the stables and dragon wings flapping when the action of the camera gives a sense of flight.

Overall, I attempted to design a new scene which aesthetically keeps with the original film through a process of analysis, creation and reflection. I explored and implemented a range of Maya techniques to create an accurate mood, texture effects, lighting and overall atmosphere whilst staying true to the How to train your Dragon camera work.

Video Trial

This is an initial experimentation video I rendered of an older version of my model, to help gain a better understanding of camera pace, cuts, pans and placement. I believe there are areas that need slower pacing, to allow the viewers to focus more on detail and some rotation that appears slightly distorted and unrealistic. I will continue this process of render and evaluation to attain better results and a nicer video sequence.

Render Problems

I have been having trouble rendering my scene lately, due to its high poly-count of 15 million faces. After vigorous research and help from the teacher, I managed to solve this problem through a number of changes:

•  editing the fog fluids
• reducing the number of faces on the chains and mountains
• ridding of some unnecessary lights
• altering the position of the ocean 

Now instead of it needing around 7 days to render, it only needs 7 hours and has a poly-count of approximately 400,000.

Animatic

Here is a animatic I created to give myself an indication of timing and the narrative-

Atmosphere

I have been experimenting with fog and lighting to get an ideal atmosphere similar to How to train your Dragon's-

Smothering Smokebreath 

I decided to create the fog using maya software render settings as opposed to fluids, because they made the file exceedingly large and slow. I feel it gives a good sense of depth, similar to that in the movie-

I also have been experimenting with light; which proved quite challenging at first, as alot of them appeared to reflect the fog causing extreme brightness-

I
I
V

But I managed to find one that works with the fog and not against it. I also added a couple of green and blue ambient lights to fit the How to train your Dragon colour scheme better.

The cliffs I created still did not appear to match the look I wanted to achieve; nor matched the How to train your dragon's environment. So I explored this further, and found a better texture mapping type to suit and give a more realistic believable feel to them-

Camera fly through

 This is the sequence I plan on having for my camera fly through. The camera will mimic the motion of a trainer flying in and landing on the land cliff, then stroll across the bridge analyzing the main features of the area that are the stone & brazier, weapons wall, dragon stables and safety chains. The trainer will then speed up and fly away.

storyboard

camera sequence