Well since ive had the day off today ive been working at home doing some more concept art work. While having lunch and watching TV, flicking though the vast amount of channels I start watching Scooby Doo.
You may think this has no relevance to the project what so ever and so did i, till there was a mine cart scene in an old gold mine where a miner was scaring people away from the town.

So here the clip from YouTube.
Enjoy, I did ! hhehe

Got some cart designs below and how the cart can join up with the second cart from behind.

Some other little designs for Kitty's room. Ive been looking into palm trees for the island which has the treasure chest on and the red balloon.

Ive used pencils, water colours, oil pastels, pro-marker pens and Photoshop.

Just getting ideas on different cart designs and looking at mine carts.


Got to have Lego ( just the best)

The one below I quite like as there are two two tracks joining up together in what looks like a cave/passage way, with rusty cart wheels on the track.

What idiots below ! lol

Here I was looking into how the cart can detach from each other and join back up easily. So here are some pictures of how trains link up together.



From looking at these pictures I started to come up with a design that would suit our cart on the ride.

These were taken from the Summer holiday to Crete (2008) in Zeus cave.


The contrast in colours and the way the rocks have fused together have a nice appeal I think, These could be used in our cave for the part of the ride.


Stalactites in the pictures above
These can give us great inspiration for modeling the cave and the type of textures can be given to the walls.

At last ive found out that the render farm is set up and working. This is good news which can speed up the post-production work flow at the end of term!

How fast is it?

A job with 8 Render Layers (one Ambient Occlusion, 2 Ray Tracing) of 200 Frames that took 5 h 50 m to render on one dual core processor. The same setting applied took 20 minutes on the render farm ! ! ! Roughly 15 times faster depending on job.

200 Frames = 20 min
1 Frame = 6 sec

Based on the figures above that it take 200 frames 20mins to render and 1 frame take 6 seconds I worked out a rough guide for how long our animation will take to render :D

So if you are looking at a 2 min animation (3200Frames) to render on the render farm it will take 5 hours and 20mins. Which is a little less time if you was rendering 200 on 1 dual core computer. ! !