I have been experimenting with how I want to achieve the flower blooms within the story of The Green Glider. These blooms where animated using a mash up of different methods – mainly blend shapes which really in its name where you can blend from one object to another by duplicating the first original mesh editing it a tad and then repeat for a few more. It was tricky to animate as blending the blend shapes to their full extent made the flowers too large and angular so I had to go in and use deformers to bend the flowers down and not dial the blend shapes all the way up.
To make the flower petals pop and look more organic after animating using the blend shapes I selected each individual petal and key’d them to pop into place, the animation could be refined more but since the world will be populated with many of these blooming plants and much more abundant with flora I think the overall scene will achieve the vivacious life of the Oasis, tests of how the overall effect looks to come!
Gentle Giant 
Nice, Graeme 🙂 I reckon you need to start thinking about depth of field to produce more impresssionst ‘soft’ effects – for example, I guess you can do that ‘in camera’ and later in AE, but maybe there is way to soften the textures themselves on the different assets in different planes, so they’re ‘out of focus too’. I think one of the challenges facing you is ‘visual hierarchy’ – i.e. what are we meant to be looking at, where’s the composition and how are you staging the action in these scenes? Using focus to push our eye towards detail – and controlling your detail – is key. I also think going for something that feels softer and more painterly in the Oasis makes sense conceptually too X
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Thanks a million for the feedback Phil! What I’ve been thinking about doing is rendering a background chunk of the Oasis as is and then bringing that into photoshop to blur it out and paint over with a more impressionist style, then bringing that render back into Maya as an alpha map, which will give some nice atmospheric perspective, I used the same effect with the wasteland world and I think its best to think of these scenes as real world photography where something has to be in focus and the rest blurred otherwise its tough to know what to look at when everything is in focus. I think hinting at things would look better too and would reduce render times and cost twofold! X
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