The Set for the Final Scene
OK, so Bill is on his horse and ready to go. Gill is also on his second and final horse and ready to catch Bill.
All I need now is the scenery for the action to take place in. Yes, I know, this means I will be shooting the end of the film before the beginning and the middle.
This is because there are a lot more people and horses involved in the early shots than at the end. So far the only characters ready to go are Bill and Gill.
“Alack! and alas! on what dangerous ground ! It’s enough to make one’s flesh to creep To stand on that fearful verge, and peep Down the rugged sides so dreadfully steep, Where the chalk-hole yawns full sixty feet deep, O’er which that steed took that desperate leap ! It was so dark then under the trees, No horse in the world could tell chalk from cheese“.
As in my previous post on making terrains ( http://3danimationmoviemaker.com/?p=26 ) I used Earth Sculptor to create my terrain and imported it to 3DExchange and then iClone. I have tried using the iClone/Earth Sculptor plug-in instead of 3DExchange, but so far it seems that 3DExchange allows you more options.
After that I populated the terrain with trees and shrubs from iClone including some from add-on packs I have acquired over the years.
The Move button
The great thing is that once you have a tree or shrub correctly sized and positioned in the required vertical plane, you can easily clone it, by holding down CTRL and using the iClone Move button (see image above). It clones as it moves. If you stop and then continue moving it, it will clone again. Once you have several items cloned, e.g. three different types of tree. you can select all three (or as many as you want) and use the same technique to clone the whole cluster, thereby saving considerable time. As always it is important to make sure you are using the object Move button and not the similar looking button further to the left, which moves your viewing point within the scene, but not the position of the objects in the scene. Sometimes you may not have enough desk left to move the item/s as far as you want in which case let go of the control key. If you keep holding control and move again, the item may clone again when all you wanted to do was move it.
To prevent them all looking uniform you can rotate then in the horizontal plane, may be resize a few slightly and lower them in the vertical plane so their trunks look shorter. Because my terrain was not completely flat around the edges, I needed to adjust the vertical plane setting for some of those on the perimeter.
We have a bit of a dilemma in that the story suggests it was too dark to see the chalk pit. However we do want our viewing audience to be able to see it. You will notice that to ensure that the chalk pit is not visible to the riders and horses as they approach, I have surrounded much of the perimeter with shrubs. Looking at the real Smugglers Leap on Google Earth, suggests that this may well have been the case.
I am not sure how good the horses will look falling through the air, so may have to do some expeditious editing at that point.
Tony