Rawldroll

Rawldroll the spy, the coward, the eyes and ears, well more the eye of Lord Akrafa.

Rawldroll basically is the equivalent of Lord Akrafa's Henchman, doing all his bidding and finding out things he should or shouldn't be finding.

Rawldroll’s large eye records all that he sees and stores it in his extra large brain, he is then able to project the recorded image to show Lord A.

Lord A is usually able to do most of his own spying using his “evil magic” but when a protection spell has been initiated, Lord A's magic spying is blocked and that is where Rawldroll's talents come in useful. But even Rawldroll uses are flawed, as the Small One has the Ring Of warning and as soon as Rawldroll moves in to spy, The Small One Knows about it and is able to take appropriate action.

Although Rawldroll has eight legs like a spider, he rarely ever walks but instead uses the energy from his extra large brain to levitate himself and travel wherever he needs to go.

The concept of Rawldroll was in constant fluctuation, I was very happy with his design but as technology changed I knew I would have to do something to soup up the already shot shots.

As I've previously mentioned, Dave Tucker and I had shot most of the model shots and I loved the lighting and the fleshy latex Rawldroll worked for me, but there were no camera moves. This was due to the fact that this was early shooting days and we didn’t have access to a motion control camera mount, in fact the thought of ever getting one at that time was never considered. I had toyed with using a skateboard with a camera housing on top, but any vibration and movement is amplified on a model shot, a skate board will work with a full size shot no problem, as the image is bigger and the movement is not as noticeable, so without motion control all the shots were static.

When I designed and constructed the archway model, I also took into consideration how I was going to light it. The model itself utilised a false depth of field, by making the second archway (B) a lot smaller than the first (A) I was able to gave the illusion of a grater distance, I also took into consideration the size of the stone texture covering it, compared to that of the size of archway (A), gradually reducing the sizes as we moved backwards to the final stone wall (C).

Then to increase the illusion, the lighting was different on each arch and wall, warm orange colours lit Archway (A), a slightly cooler lighting lit Archway (B) and finally a Blue light on the wall (C) this gave the illusion that the entrance to the underground lair was coming from the direction of the blue light.

I mentioned also that John Morris who was going to be doing some of the CG work on the movie had played around with making Rawldroll as a CG character and it was starting to look promising even though the tests show him the wrong colour, they did show possibilities for future plans.

Early Test Rendering of Rawldroll by John Morris

The model shots were in the can so I added Rawldroll's blinks in TV paint using clips of footage that had Rawldroll with an eyelid I had made, this made the positioning perfect and the angle fit, as well as a good lighting match, Rawldroll's mouth was also added using TV paint by digitising a real mouth and adding all the mouthed shaped words, a frame at a time.

I decided to move on to other shots thinking that would be it with the Rawldroll shots, but I started to learn how to use Lightwave and found out about wrapping moving textures onto objects, now, I don't know if you know but Lightwave is vector based and that means that the texture keeps it's quality even if you go in very close, in fact it’s very useful for even re -framing or adding a light to a specific area of the image, even a moving image, if required. Anyway, I started to learn how to use Lightwave and new concepts of how I could change the already shot shots came into play.

Instead of a fixed camera position, for the scene that takes place under the bowls of the remains of The Tree of Power, I now could track back on the shot moving back over molten larva into the "Barfan". I extended the model shot with walls and also extended the cave floor. To this I then added moving lava flowing past camera, yes at that point there was no smoke or flames but these would be added later using a particle emulator.

The close ups of Rawldroll were all re- framed in Lightwave and over the top of the eye, a reflected moving image of Lord A was rendered. Then after that render I used the particle emulator to add more prominent flames, all the time taking into consideration Rawldroll's blink, the blink had to be taken into consideration for the render and the particle emulation.

Because of John Morris's research into producing a 3D animated Rawldroll, I knew that even with my limited knowledge I could build a Rawldroll in Light wave with all it's legs and the top of the head missing. The top of the head was missed out because I needed a POV shot (point of view) from Rawldroll's perspective of Lord Akrafa towering over him and the best way was to build the CG model without the top of it's head. So the virtual camera could be placed were Rawldroll's Eye would go, this way no matter where he looked, the camera would see what he saw, and that included his tentacles stretched out in front of him.

Again for Rawldroll's POV shots, particle animation was added, must emphasise adding particle emulation to a static shot is virtually straight forward but if the camera or foreground objects are moving then you must produce animated blockers and move them a frame at a time, the blockers allow the effect to be placed behind an object and like I said if either the camera or object is moving these animated blockers must be added.

So all of these new tools and elements changed how the scene between Rawldroll and Lord Akrafa was to be played out, this meant unfortunately a whole host of angles and shots of Rawldroll were not going to be used, but I have added several to give an idea of various other real time elements that would have been in the scene and movie.