Rango - beginning scene

When I rendered out a test for my animation, I placed a plain blue background for the sky. I said I may go back and develop on this, however first I thought I would look at other times where the background has been pretty simple and has worked with the style of the animation.

Take Rango for example, the beginning scenes is of him in his tank, it isn't quite noticeable at first until you see the joints of the background, yet saying this, it still works. There is a slight gradient to the sky and a few clouds added to try and give a sense of realism to it, even though at the time you think it's probably fake anyway. I think it works though because it works with the detailing and texturing of Rango himself, so it doesn't look too out of place.

It's quite interesting to see the contrast between this beginning scene with it being so basic and the rest of the film. The textures for every other character is pretty astounding and so complex. For Rango himself, they had 120 different effects maps and 20 colour maps to make up all of his scales. I would want to try and see what I could do with textures (obviously not to this standard), to see what I would be able to create on Photoshop to then place it back onto my character. However due to the style of my animation it wouldn't fit in very well. As the style of my animation is all based around Brio - block plastic colours, I think just a plain background could work. I could experiment with putting clouds in the background and possibly have them moving across the screen at a slow place just to give it some movement.

Rango

It took my awhile, but I finally got round to watching Rango. To begin with I didn't really take much interest in the film when it first came out, but now after watching I wish I did. Normally it's the narrative which gets my attention, however with this film I found I was really drawn into the texturing of each character. Normally I am far more interested in the actual animation itself, but I couldn't take my eyes away from how life-like these textures were.

I found myself wanting to find out how these textures were done after watching the film so I did a bit of research and this is what I found. At ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) viewpainters paint texture maps, in total they painted 37 buildings, 1,000 props, 28,000 set dressing objects - rocks, pebbles, grass, cactus. 130 characters. That is pretty amazing considering they did it in two and a half years. For Rango himself, they used ZBrush displacement to produce bump maps and scales for his skin. They had 120 different effects maps and 20 colour maps. The whole thing would have been so complex and time consuming, that 2 1/2 years doesn't seem enough, especially when you compare it to Pixar. Pixar normally take around 5 years from story to the final film, so for ILM to produce something as detailed as this is pretty incredible. I admit that to me their story was lacking a bit, I wasn't engaged in it too much and it seemed pretty predictable, however they made up with it with their characters and all the textures they produced.

Before this film came along I was never too bothered about textures, but after seeing this I would love to try and get better when I come to texture my models too. Obviously it would takes years to become skilled in this area and you would need the specific resources and software to help you along, but it shows that it is possible to achieve something so life-like and detailed.