I started with the set up of the desert environment. The first image without the texture applied was the original idea of the environment.
In this first version, I imagined the the creature falling and hitting the sand creating a dust and sand clouds. Again, as much as particle and that sort of VFX interest me, I didn’t have the time to learn for this project. Which led to the set up in the second image where everything is situated much closer together. An issue with this set up was that it lacked an effective middle ground. If I were to do this again, I would build up a middle ground.
While I set up the environments, my creature was in the scene and I used him to set up cameras. I looked into cameras with aim constraints and constraining the camera to a motion path. Which led to the third image. I found that if I constrained my camera to a path, once I animated the camera past those frames the motion path would work. (Towards the end of the project I found a way around this, but was too late to apply it to this scene) But my solution in that moment was to divide the scene and in the third image only one rock is present because that’s all that is seen by the camera so I figured deleting the other rocks would make the scene easier to process.
Models (rocks and creatures) credit to me; the HDR in the scene was from CGAxis