When I wrote The Smith I had this idea of Valhalla, a gigantic cruise-like longship that sailed across the skies picking up fallen warriors, carrying Yggdrasil with it to, at the same time, deliver life everywhere.
It took me a while to determine the shape of the longship head, originally I wanted a very robust horse but I wasn’t able to fully translate it to 3D without looking Greek. Then I decided to go for a dragon (which is historically more accurate for what I intended) but the damn thing looked like an Amusement Park Mechanical Ride so in the end I went the simple shape way and achieved a pretty cool dragon head. The problem then was that the more details the less Norse it looked, even with the references I was following, so I didn’t add any more details.
I wanted to try something different because hand-painting the whole thing would take a while, so I used maps. I found this website which provided me with every single texture needed and the results were quite satisfying. I made some very state-of-the-art UV as well.
For the clouds I turned Metaballs into Blender’s more recent volumetric addition, and they looked really good. They also took a while to render. A friend of mine asked me for some beauty shots of the shit to make a new video and add sound effects with the intention of having more SFX Reel Material, and so I made them and took 2 full days to render. I had to use another method for those clouds because the volumetric metaballs wouldn’t do the trick, so I followed a tutorial for procedural clouds which worked pretty good. The problem was that I wanted the longship to collide with the clouds and that was a problem because after many tries with different clouds I realized that my computer wasn’t strong enough for all the calculations that had to be done, it was too much a work.
A problem I wasn’t able to solve was the blue flame from Yggdrasil (the tree from the back), for reasons I couldn’t figure it wouldn’t render appropiately. You may get glances of it but it’s technically not entirely there. I’ll have to revisit that in the future.