The VALE OF aRALUEN : WORLD BUILD
Idea
Part of our grand plan for AYANE Studios is to share the whole production process for each of our animated film shorts on our YouTube channel as a series of studio diaries.
This project began with the idea of creating an animated title sequence and some short B roll sequences for the first of those diaries, our ‘introducing us and our studio’ episode. We wanted the first thing people saw from us on YouTube to be a beautiful fairytale animation sequence with a magical score.
This idea came to me after watching the latest videos from two of my favourite content creators in quick succesion; Jonna Jinton and Roaming Wild Rosie. Their videos always have incredibly beautiful cinematic drone shots of the stunning Swedish forest that surrounds where they each live. I’ve known for a long time that I really wanted to have similar shots in our videos given our love of the natural world and what inspires us. But as we sadly don’t live somewhere quite so picturesque as Jonna and Rosie at the moment I knew this sort of footage was going to be hard to do without driving large distances on a regular basis. I was pondering this dilemma when the idea bloomed in my head to create an animated version of these beautiful sequences, but with a fairytale twist!
Concept
The Vale of Araluen is an enchanted land that is home to our imaginary HQ as well as a multitude of magical creatures and plants. Protected by strong warding spells it has become a sanctuary for all that live there.
Aspirations
Hush the imposter syndrome gremlins
get start
begin developing an art style
Gallery
Explore the evolution and development of the Vale of Araluen from the initial concept through to the finished world.
Loch Elva
Home to the Water Dragons and an ancient Kelp Forest
The Visken Forest
Location of the world’s largest tree sprite settlement
Fairy Falls
Legend has it that the song of the water nymphs that live here is responsible for the beautiful flowers that bloom around the falls
INSPIRATION
From Disney’s Tangled to remote Scottish waterfalls, read more about our inspirations for the Vale of Araluen.
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Monet Bridge and Lily Pond
I have loved Monet’s water lily series and the gardens that inspired it since I first discovered them in art class at school. They just radiate tranquility and beauty.
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Mother Gothel's Tower
If only you could actually buy houses like this! This tower and it’s valley location was one of the first influences on the early development of The Vale of Araluen.
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Fairy Pools - Isle of Skye
We came across the beautiful Fairy Pools during a hike with our boys. There was a really magical feeling in the air with the sound of crystal clear water babbling down the valley.
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Wisteria Trees
I love the incredible ancient Wisteria trees in Japan. They look like something straight out of a fairy tale, but with the added illumination they are beyond beautiful.
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French Châteaux
A lot of the details of Castle Araluen are inspired by renaissance style château architecture. Château Chenonceau, d’Ussé, Fontainebleau, Pierrefonds, Chamboard and Belle Epoque are some of my favourites.
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Painterly Art Style
I knew from very earlier on that I wanted to use a painterly art style. I love the softness and beautiful light effects that can be achieved. I also like the idea that it can contribute to creating a very unique and beautiful world.
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Enchanted Forest
Every good fairy tale has an enchanted forest. Some are good and some are bad. I’ve embraced both sides with our forest, the deciding factor for which side you see depends on your motivation for entering the vale.
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Loch Ness and Nessie
I grew up not far from the beautiful Loch Ness and the legend of Nessie (the Loch Ness monster) is something I’ve always known. My dream castle just had to have it’s own loch and legendary creatures inhabiting it.
If you have any questions about our inspirations or the world in general, please send us a note.
Journal Posts
Follow our progress and adventures through our blog posts.
Reference Tutorials
If you like the elements we’ve created and would like to have a go at creating something similar I’ve listed all the tutorials we’ve done to build the Vale of Araluen below. Please note that they are only reference tutorials and that I have modified them all, in some cases pretty significantly. But hopefully they will be enough to get you started. Also if you would like to know which courses we did to get started with Blender you can find them all here.
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Water Lily
Tutorial Link : Water Lily
Notes : I have modified the petal array nodes to achieve a nicer flower shape. I have also added emission shaders to the petals and stemen to make our lilies more magical.
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Silver Birch Bark
Tutorial Link : Bark Texture 1
Notes : I started with this texture tutorial but I have changed it quite a lot by adding in more, and more detailed color ramp nodes to achieve the water colour texture.
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Pine Tree Bark
Tutorial Link : Bark Texture 2
Notes : I did a similar thing with this texture to the silver birch bark. I put in additional and more detailed color ramps and removed the bump and displacement mapping.
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Lamp Light Flowers
Tutorial Link : Glowing Flower
Notes : I’ve stuck to the geometry pretty closely but I have changed the colors and the opacity settles to get the bioluminescent effect I wanted for out glowing flowers.
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Grass
Tutorial Link : Stylised Animated Grass
Notes : Because I wanted to use the Cycles render engine I had to make lots of changes to the materials to get them to work, but the linked tutorial should get you started.
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Wisteria
Tutorial Link : Twisted Tree
Notes : I couldn’t find any wisteria tutorials, so I got creative and adapted this twisted tree tutorial. I have modified the way the ‘leaves’ are placed on the branches a fair bit.
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Willow Trees
Tutorial Link : Twisted Tree
Notes : Another variation of the twisted tree tutorial. Like the wisteria I tweaked the placement of the leaves and in this case the shape too to get the desired shape.
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Forest Pine Trees
Tutorial Link : Fir Tree
Notes : Blender studio’s amazing tutorial for a low poly procedural pine tree is the base model for the distant forest trees with added painterly effects.
A huge thank you Kaizen, Ryan King, Tiny Nocky, Grant Abbott…. for sharing their Blender knowledge and expertise through their tutorials. Without their contributions to the YouTube academy I wouldn’t have been able to create the Vale of Araluen. If you are looking for a tutorial to help you with your own project I highly recommend checking out their channels. Happy creating!
Project Overview
-
Part of our grand plan for AYANE Studios is to share the whole production process for each of our animated film shorts on our YouTube channel as a series of studio diaries.
This project began with the idea of creating an animated title sequence and some short B roll sequences for the first of those diaries, our ‘introducing us and our studio’ episode. We wanted the first thing people saw from us on YouTube to be a beautiful fairytale animation sequence with a magical score.
This idea came to me after watching the latest videos from two of my favourite content creators in quick succesion; Jonna Jinton and Roaming Wild Rosie. Their videos always have incredibly beautiful cinematic drone shots of the stunning Swedish forest that surrounds where they each live. I’ve known for a long time that I really wanted to have similar shots in our videos given our love of the natural world and what inspires us. But as we sadly don’t live somewhere quite so picturesque as Jonna and Rosie at the moment I knew this sort of footage was going to be hard to do without driving large distances on a regular basis. I was pondering this dilemma when the idea bloomed in my head to create an animated version of these beautiful sequences, but with a fairytale twist!
-
Our very first world build and animation project. The Vale of Araluen is an enchanted land that is home to our imaginary HQ as well as a multitude of magical creatures and plants.
The project with comprise of a series of short episodes about each of the creatures and their habitats - think David Attenborough documentaries but set in a fantasy world.
-
Our plan with this series is to gradually work our way up to the really ambitious projects and stories we have in the pipeline by focusing on different techniques, skills and aspects of animation in each episode. Our hope is that it will help us build our visual and audio story telling skills as each episode will focus on a new character and require different ways of shooting the animation sequences and new thematic material for the music score.
Learn Blender and begin growing our skills by building a world and a couple of characters from scratch
Begin developing our own art style
Practice writing music to picture
Hush our imposter syndrome gremlins
Have fun!
-
We’ve learned a staggering amount during this project. But our biggest lessons have been;
Breaking things down into tiny steps - this was a huge project especially when you factor in that we had to learn how to use Blender and figure out what we needed to learn first. Our joblist at one was huge and at times things felt very overwhelming. But by breaking each ‘need to learn’ down into tiny steps we got there a little by little.
Learning to play and experiment without being judgemental - I have very loud and grumpy imposter syndrome gremlins who demand perfection and instant results which can often lead to epic levels of procrastination. I’ve found during this project that the best results have come when I just play and follow the idea with zero pressure to finish something.
-
As we mentioned above The Vale of Araluen is a series and we have lots of episodes planned that we are going to steadily work our way through over the next year.
PROJECT Overview and idea
Project synopsis
-
Part of our grand plan for AYANE Studios is to share the whole production process for each of our animated film shorts on our YouTube channel as a series of studio diaries. As we are an animation and music studio we wanted the first thing people saw from us to be a beautiful fairytale animation sequence with an orchestral score.
This project began with the idea of creating an animated title sequence and some short B roll sequences for the first of those diaries, our ‘introducing us and our studio’ episode.
This idea came to me after watching the latest videos from two of my favourite content creators in quick succesion; Jonna Jinton and Roaming Wild Rosie. Their videos always have incredibly beautiful cinematic drone shots of the stunning Swedish forest that surrounds where they each live. I’ve known for a long time that I really wanted to have similar shots in our videos given our love of the natural world and what inspires us. But as we sadly don’t live somewhere quite so picturesque as Jonna and Rosie at the moment I knew this sort of footage was going to be hard to do without driving large distances on a regular basis. I was pondering this dilemma when the idea bloomed in my head to create an animated version of these beautiful sequences, but with a fairytale twist!
-
Our very first world build and animation project. The Vale of Araluen is an enchanted land that is home to our imaginary HQ as well as a multitude of magical creatures and plants.
The project with comprise of a series of short episodes about each of the creatures and their habitats - think David Attenborough documentaries but set in a fantasy world.
-
Our plan with this series is to gradually work our way up to the really ambitious projects and stories we have in the pipeline by focusing on different techniques, skills and aspects of animation in each episode. Our hope is that it will help us build our visual and audio story telling skills as each episode will focus on a new character and require different ways of shooting the animation sequences and new thematic material for the music score.
Learn Blender and begin growing our skills by building a world and a couple of characters from scratch
Begin developing our own art style
Practice writing music to picture
Hush our imposter syndrome gremlins
Have fun!
-
We’ve learned a staggering amount during this project. But our biggest lessons have been;
Breaking things down into tiny steps - this was a huge project especially when you factor in that we had to learn how to use Blender and figure out what we needed to learn first. Our joblist at one was huge and at times things felt very overwhelming. But by breaking each ‘need to learn’ down into tiny steps we got there a little by little.
Learning to play and experiment without being judgemental - I have very loud and grumpy imposter syndrome gremlins who demand perfection and instant results which can often lead to epic levels of procrastination. I’ve found during this project that the best results have come when I just play and follow the idea with zero pressure to finish something.
-
As we mentioned above The Vale of Araluen is a series and we have lots of episodes planned that we are going to steadily work our way through over the next year.
PROJECT Overview and idea
Project synopsis
-
Part of our grand plan for AYANE Studios is to share the whole production process for each of our animated film shorts on our YouTube channel as a series of studio diaries. As we are an animation and music studio we wanted the first thing people saw from us to be a beautiful fairytale animation sequence with an orchestral score.
This project began with the idea of creating an animated title sequence and some short B roll sequences for the first of those diaries, our ‘introducing us and our studio’ episode.
This idea came to me after watching the latest videos from two of my favourite content creators in quick succesion; Jonna Jinton and Roaming Wild Rosie. Their videos always have incredibly beautiful cinematic drone shots of the stunning Swedish forest that surrounds where they each live. I’ve known for a long time that I really wanted to have similar shots in our videos given our love of the natural world and what inspires us. But as we sadly don’t live somewhere quite so picturesque as Jonna and Rosie at the moment I knew this sort of footage was going to be hard to do without driving large distances on a regular basis. I was pondering this dilemma when the idea bloomed in my head to create an animated version of these beautiful sequences, but with a fairytale twist!
-
Our very first world build and animation project. The Vale of Araluen is an enchanted land that is home to our imaginary HQ as well as a multitude of magical creatures and plants.
The project with comprise of a series of short episodes about each of the creatures and their habitats - think David Attenborough documentaries but set in a fantasy world.
-
Our plan with this series is to gradually work our way up to the really ambitious projects and stories we have in the pipeline by focusing on different techniques, skills and aspects of animation in each episode. Our hope is that it will help us build our visual and audio story telling skills as each episode will focus on a new character and require different ways of shooting the animation sequences and new thematic material for the music score.
Learn Blender and begin growing our skills by building a world and a couple of characters from scratch
Begin developing our own art style
Practice writing music to picture
Hush our imposter syndrome gremlins
Have fun!
-
We’ve learned a staggering amount during this project. But our biggest lessons have been;
Breaking things down into tiny steps - this was a huge project especially when you factor in that we had to learn how to use Blender and figure out what we needed to learn first. Our joblist at one was huge and at times things felt very overwhelming. But by breaking each ‘need to learn’ down into tiny steps we got there a little by little.
Learning to play and experiment without being judgemental - I have very loud and grumpy imposter syndrome gremlins who demand perfection and instant results which can often lead to epic levels of procrastination. I’ve found during this project that the best results have come when I just play and follow the idea with zero pressure to finish something.
-
As we mentioned above The Vale of Araluen is a series and we have lots of episodes planned that we are going to steadily work our way through over the next year.