After
the big disappointment of the first episode,
I did not expect much from the second part
as well, that is why it was such a great surprise
when I watched it! I liked the end of the
movie so much, that I knew that I have to
make my own version of it... :)
Picture
#1 / Screenshot from the original movie (image
by Lucasfilm).
The
terrible amount of details that was needed
for such a project could not have been afforded
without at least a dedicated home computer
(my has dual Amd MP2000+ processors, with
1 gigs of memory, it was pretty much the maximum
I could get out of such a computer). I started
creating the scene using 3ds Max and VRay.
At that time however, VRay had a top limit
on renderable polygons (the newer versions
can render unlimited polygons), which was
about 1/30th of the scene, so I switched to
Brazil. It was the perfect choice as I figured
out later on...
Credits:
Most
meshes that are in the scene are downloaded
from the web (mostly from scifi3d.com), the
rest of them were box-modelled. The texturing
and composition was done completely by me.
Basic
workflow:
First,
I created the ground, on which I placed the
landing pads. This was the basic setup, I
saved the file. After that, every new component
was added to the scene by merging from another
document. For example, to add another element
to the scene, I opened up a blank scene, merged
the basic ground plane and landing pads into
the new scene and added the elements (the
ground and the landing pads provided me with
the measures, and outline of the scene, so
I knew exactly where to place the new things).
This was necessary, because the overall scene
contained too many polygons, and it was almost
impossible to work in. After an element was
created, I merged it into the final scene.
To be able to use the final scene for rendering,
almost every element was turned to box-shape
in the viewports, to save computer resources.
Picture #2 / Setting up the basics of the
scene, most of the proportions are wrong.
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Texturing:
Texturing
was done during the element creation phase,
so only the final and textured meshes were
merged into the final scene. The background
is a photo (the mountains and the clouds),
it would have been simply too much for the
computer to do that in 3d as well. The rest
of the textures are tiled jpg pictures, mixed
in different ways using the "mix",
"blend" and "falloff"
materials. I avoided using raytrace materials,
they would have probably crashed the rendering
if I did. There is a slight "film noise"
effect on the rendering, so it looks a bit
grainer.
Picture
#3 / The scene with textures added to it,
also, some of the proportions are corrected.
The
soldiers:
The
biggest challenge was to create an impressive,
huge army. In the scene, there are between
6000-8000 soldiers. I started by texuring
the first soldier, I tried adding not-so-high
quality materials, to save rendering resources,
however every soldier is equipped with an
UVW map. There are two types of soldiers I
used, the troopers and their commanders. All
of the soldiers were "instanced"
from the first ones. When it came to duplicating
them, I did not use the built-in "array"
feature of Max (I hand placed them), because
I wanted it to look much more random, so basically
every soldier has a unique position in the
scene for added realism...
Picture #4 / Changed the layout a bit and
added thousands of more soldiers.
