Start to finish

At the start my first initial idea was

and it has become a lot better than this since the beginning.

After a couple of different attempts that is what I ended up with, the water going through a few minor changes and a few tests to get a better look on the water itself, having changed not just that the clouds were bad and also the cave was very amateurish.

You can tell from the assets of the first idea. 

I should have named the layers, but that would take a bit too long and when I drew the items sometimes it was just shading so I could move things and change it easier.

Artist Reply

Having an artists email to be able to reach out and ask them questions is helpful, I did email a favourite artist of mine. He does animations and told me about how he started.
Jeff Le bars he has a website of his own with an amazing showreel at his own website jefflebars.com/ .
After making contact with him he told me about the programs he used and how he started off.
I started the conversation by sending an email to him, this was when I was 17 and I'm not anymore,

He responded saying that he used paper to start with, sculpting and animating traditionally, he said the 
programs he uses,
"Photoshop, 3DsMax, TVPaint, After Effects and Premiere respectively for : backgrounds, characters,
 traditional animation, compositing and editing." He also said that he used a Wacom tablet. Which is the
same of the one I bought at home. 

He went on to explain that it takes a very long time to traditionally animate and it's a lot faster on the 
computer. He went on to explain that "Photoshop is good for making backgrounds or assets for After Effects
animation".
Then he explained that he uses TVPaint and that he's happy with it, which is what I want to now look into,
if you see the quality of his work, it's very very good, I recommend looking at his showreel.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbQgXeY_zi4

Proof of the conversation. I'd rather not show the emails themselves because of privacy. But he did say that

I could show the college the conversation, but I'd rather not just show the emails sent to me.

(3rd artist)

Water testing and animation.

Water testing was just me messing around with brushes to try and get the right water for my project.

Using a couple of different techniques I ended up making a brush and using it to make this water like gif.

The brush I used was one with lines in and circles which made the light blue parts as the circles were overlapping. I used a bunch of different colours at first started looking like this.

Then I added a colour correction and changing the hue to get what I have here. 

I then used "Transform" in the edit menu to find perspective and played around with that till I had a nice view of what water should look like, I made the gif by just using the frame animation like I did a while ago on my old project.

This is the finished water texture for my piece but I did do more experiments.

Which are here but they didn't turn out too well:

except for this one:

Then I got a few which weren't so good.

As these were all tests I would rather show my development to what my work is today then leave this in the files.

Final design and improvements

As I experimented with brushes ect, I had a little help making changes to the clouds and refining the tree's. After doing this I can only now think to change the water, make it more realistic as well as the ground, looking up pictures and reference images to help me along the way.

In my personal opinion water is very difficult to even try and create, making a waterfall was a lot easier with a reference image, so making the water itself should be just as easy, right? Well not exactly... Trying to make the water is very difficult not knowing where to start. After having a small idea to restart the water maybe I could just try it out first on a blank page. As then I could probably copy the image almost exactly. Therefore making it easier to draw the water myself. As I could also change the underground a little. It would help to create the underground by making a small layer after the grass, darker than the rest.

Video of Unreal test

Testing out Unreal editor.

I have made a small "Office" that was a little project to make on the Unreal editor. I made mine a little off. Adding an odd background as if it was a sandstorm in the background that actually is animated like the clouds it starts you with.

On this image the floor is chrome and I added a little too much gold, but it was just testing the textures. The reflection on the chrome seems really good if it's on something else. Like a car or maybe a chain ect. All of the objects in this scene were taken from a Maya file that we were told to use. It was a little easy to transfer from Maya to Unreal, just by exporting the selection as an "FBX export" which then could just be imported to Unreal, tweaked and sorted into folders to make everything easier to access and control. There wasn't many problems with this software, except for maybe lag which was caused by the computer and nothing I could control except for changing the graphics down, and up for taking a high resolution screenshot. Which is what I did here. Making the scene look a lot better. In the little fort thing made of tables and two golden doors there is 12 generators because I was enjoying messing with the copy and paste tool, as it was really easy, just hold alt while moving the object.

Communication and Presentation survey