Applied Animation: Environment Concepts - The Ramtop Mountains

Unlike the Hall of Hourglasses, this is an environment that I didn't feel necessarily needed to be planned out so much, but more of an environment that I could just go with and work with what I came up with. Similarly to the space environment I created the other day, this is also an environment that I intend to use in After Effects. Because I want to pan through this scene, I had to think about how I was going to achieve this in After Effects and I decided to create a composition I could pan through that was also made of several layers in preparation for use with the 3D cameras in After Effects.

Whilst drawing this environment I started to think about the detail within the whole composition and whether or not I wanted to include a lot of detail or very minimal detail. However, I couldn't make up my mind so I decided to create a very basic mountain range composition that could be used within After Effects to see if I liked the aesthetic but after seeing it completed I decided that it would fit in with the rest of my animation and decided that detail was a definite must-have.

Original design

Improving upon the original design I decided to use a textured brush with the opacity reduced to create some detail and texture. I instantly saw an improvement after completing the first layer and decided that this technique would work well with the aesthetic of the whole animation. However, this left the 'sky' un-textured and looking odd. Referring back to the description of the environment in the book I realised that it was a very gloomy place where it constantly rains and has an unyielding storm floating through it. So I decided to use the cloud tool in Photoshop to add some storm clouds that I could stagger in After Effects.

Detail and texture

The final image does look a bit crowded, but I have to remember that it will look different in After Effects, as the layers will staggered. Luckily each cloud and mountain range are on a separate layer, so it will be easy to remove a layer if I am not happy with it or if I feel that the composition is still over crowded when I come to animating it. 

With clouds