"OW
media projects" is an italian media
design agency.
The following article describes the making of
a 20 sec. commercial i did for the above mentioned
company, in charge as 3D animator and concept
artist.
It tooks me one month to sketch out the project,
model and surface, animate and render using
Lightwave
3D
Composite and post-process all the frames with
After
Effects.
The entire work had to be done on a single workstation
(1 cpu).
Final render took almost a week.
Some screenshots (reduced from the original
D1/PAL resolution)
Click to enlarge
MODELING
Let's
start from the cityscape.
Before, just let me say this is not the best
way to build up a cityscape but for sure it's
fast.
The
technique is simple.
Just create a disc
(do not exaggerate with sides...).
Then place some points
in a new layer (try to follow a scheme,
we are building up a city).
Point Clone Plus (play with random
scale and random
size).
You'll get several discs with different sizes.
Then BEVEL (with
-/+random
values for inset
and shift)...
You'll
see the buildings coming up all together at
the same time in different shapes.
Repeat the last step several times until you're
satisfied.
You'd get something like
<--------- this
At
this point, as you may guess, i
needed a different kind of buildings.
This time i'm beveling out some faces from a
grid plane.
Once again... BEVEL
with -/+random
values for inset
and shift.
(at the end, remember to get rid of all the
polygons you don't need)
Hhmm... someday i would like to make a new "Tron".
The OW corporation building!
Just created a 2D polygon (octagon)... then
used the BEVEL tool
to build it up.
The circular item on the top was modeled beveling
out a disc several times.
As
i was advancing with the cityscape, wanted to
enhance depth and sense of movement.
The
train tunnel was modeled beveling a shape...
array tool wasused
to duplicate the piece.
Some cylinders
were added to complete the item.
So, once the tunnel is complete... how about
a train?
It was modeled using the same tunnel's cross-section.
Just few point editing
to shape it a little bit better.
Train's motion was fast, running away from the
camera...
and of course we love tasteful motion
blur right?
So had no needing to detail it too much (waste
of time and polygons).
It's time to add some life to the cityscape...
Nothing better than airships flying through
the sky... right?
The model is pretty simple but again... fast
action, motion blur...
there was no needing to waste time with advanced
spacecraft design and increase unreasonably
the global polygons count.
The subpatch models were rendered with a low
patch division.
Also, since subpatch... it was easy, with a
few point editing, to create various aircrafts
starting from the same main fuselage.
QUICK TIP:
A nice way to create dense air-traffic should
be
PARTICLE SYSTEMS.
(i'm sure you'll figure out by yourself what
i mean).
The
guide bot.
As main actor, of course it required a good
amount of detail.
(enough to stand any extreme close-up)
It was modeled starting from a sphere
(converted to subpatch)
SMOOTHSHIFT the primary modeling
tool
Some primitives to add the small detail Discs and
BEVEL tool to create antennas and
lens Point clone plus
to duplicate mechanics (random
scale) RAIL EXTRUSION
to extrude the black cables
"Smooth
shade" OpenGL preview.
As you may guess, a good value for patch
divisions was necessary to obtain
smooth surfaces and perfect edges.
LIGHTING
The
scene lighting (outdoor) consist of 74 lights.
LW's ambient light
set to 0.0
73 lights (the skydome light, in place of lw's
default ambient light) were placed with the
help of "Lightswarm"plugin.
Each
skydome light is a spotlight with shadowmaps
and subtle light intensity.
It faked global illumination producing soft-shadows
(also had no needing to place any fill light).
Since it's an outdoor environment, there is
a distant light
(key-light) with raytraced shadows.
James Busby wrote a very good tutorial
about this lighting rig.
OVERCASTER
Talking
about how to fake global illumination...
An excellent alternative: OVERCASTER
Written by Erkki Halkka, it's a very useful
collection of premade lighting rigs (it uses
the spinning light trick).
SURFACING
The
guide bot was surfaced totally with procedurals
textures.
(so had no needing to create UVmaps, saving
further time)
Picture
and explanations right below.
It
was made layering procedurals as PuffyClouds,
Turbulence and multi-fractal (through Color,
Diffuse, Specular, Reflectivity, Bump channels).
It worked out very good producing some realistic
rusted/weathered surfaces.
I really suggest you to check out DAVE
WILSON's online portfolio.
His "making of the MTS Arach" contains
a full description about this surfacing technique
(also i really like his work).
Several
panelry maps were used to surface both cityscape
and ships (though i wished, had not time to
paint custom maps).
The maps were layered through different surface
channels.
Projection was standard planar, cylindric or
cubic.
THE KIRBY METAL SURFACING:
Just found that an interesting metal surfacing
effect can be achieved using a panelry texture
map (reflect. channel) stretched along Y axis...
the purpose is to shape reflections.
It may sound weird but... it produced what i
named the Kirby metal surfaces.
Just check out the renders
or simply CLICK
HEREand have a look at the buildings
(the circular ones at the sides).
If you know Jack
Kirby's comics and his (wonderful)
drawing style, you'll know what i mean with
kirby metal surfacing.
It's
always a great thing to increase photorealism
level adding a fallof to reflections, transparencies
(FRESNEL).
I just used gradients
(incidence angle
as input parameter) to improve glass transparence
and metals reflectivity.
TIP:
Feel free to experiment gradients to control
any surface property... not just reflectivity
and transparence.
ANIMATION
All
the motions were created keyframing
the items in different positions, then tweaking
axis values (motion and rotation) with the graph
editor.
Noisy channel
plugin was used to add a slight random noise
to the motions (Bot and Camera)... to simulate
heavy gravity and thrusters.
Finally some Fog
(yellow desert color) was added to make the
air dense increasing depth and mood.
Hope
the article was inspiring and useful someway.
For any question do not hesitate to drop me
some lines.
(it may just take me a while to respond, but
i will).
