Combined Setting and Base set up for Lighting

The sets now are all brought together and are sinking up. I've painted few more texture/transparency maps to make sure all is sticking ( example the far away water edge flows nicely into the sky or the tops of the mountains merge with atmosphere ect.)

Also Alan helped a lot with understanding the lighting set up, how to think about it. To my joy, it looks like its gonna be pretty much hands on when I will actually play with light types and it won't all disappear under heavy tables of maya generated lighting.

Plan and the Block out of Ivan's World

Initially I started with rough plan of the world.

Then working in maya I made changes to scaling. Because now having story set and clear idea  it also became clear  how much of each environment is needed.

For pre-viz and animation purposes I figured to do initial environment modeling which will be developed through the entire project time simultaneously to other tasks. Again, I bothered myself enough to solve problems in concept art stage, so that when I'm building it serves as a reference.

Trees at the moment are only basic representations. To give an idea how many of them I need and what actually can be achieved with matt paintings.

As I mentioned before, I try to keep the translation from 2d to 3d as close as possible, however, particularly in Dream Island's case, there are lots of things that don't translate as successfully and fail to create the intended feel of the environment ... A Yellow sticker  there...

For now this is pretty much enough to inform animating, so apart from rigging problem there is no reason to wait with animating.