Digital Art Zone

All pre production is finished for the first series of shots and so I just broke ground on my very first completely CGI short film!

Yay! :D

Can’t wait to see it !!!

Well it’s probably gonna be awhile.

Maybe you can post some wip’s here? We love to see teasers

Ha! Dude are you the one who made Siruis Labs? I’m totally using it in this animation! lol

It’s a beast to render (and I’m only using a lowly Pentium D which doesn’t help) so I’m having to do transparent PNG sequences over the flat rendered backgrounds, but it’s worth it, Siruis is sick!

And yeah, I can probably post a few things as I go.

You can actually see some of Sirius’s color scheme even in this first shot. I basically am framing the tones around Sirius.

That will be awesome! I can’t wait to see it all come together - if you need help with some Sirius Labs rendering, just let me know - we don’t want your computer to have a meltdown You could setup and save some cameras, and then I could render the scenes for your backdrop

I just came across this image today on my hard drive and was thinking about doing some animations - so I think it must be fate

Absolutely fate.

I’ll hit you up if I need any help rendering, but I’m pretty sure so long as I don’t try to physically animate a camera moving through Sirius I should be fine. Basically I’m just filming those shots (and some others) like you would traditional animation with a kind of digital matte painting (Sirius) as the backdrop for the animated characters.

In the lower rez places like the corridors and hanger of the station I can animate pretty much in-scene, but any of the really dense places like Sirius it’s all old school.

Oh, and the short film is about robot folk as I didn’t want to risk trying to effectively animate living things in Carrara.

BC Rice (OMG that is an old grain) I do not have Sirius (sorry 3Dlust) but one handy thing is to render big 360º spherical scenes with the spherical camera zoomed out at 90º and then use them in background with a shadowcatcher plane.
you can only rotate, not pan the camera but it is a way to move around an otherwise unwieldy scene.

Yeah that’s essentially what I’m doing except I bring the backgrounds into AE and the PNG transparent sequenced characters (or blue/green screen depending) are overlayed on the backgrounds. You can then create shadows by just duplicating and then twisting the layer in 3D space and blacking out the original layer and then changing its opacity/blur, etc.

I don’t think either scenario works perfectly, though, as the undulations in, say, a textured wall isn’t going to be perfect, but to the normal eye it’s clean enough.

And “old grain”? You mean the computer? Yeah, she’s friggin ancient. But I make it do what it do. 

BC Rice, BC=before Christ Rice=Grain!! yeah my humour pretty sad if I gotta explain my jokes!

omg lol

Honestly, that was so funny went *completely* over my head!

Getting the ship ready to be inserted in the scene! :D

So I’m pretty much finished with the background layer. I’ve already got the ship animation rendered out, but because I have to do motion tracking, etc, I’m doing the ship’s pass in a different composition. In there I’ll do the color correction, atmospheric elements and any sort of lens perspective adjustments that might be needed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RWroXnnZno

Hey BC Rice,

Funnily : , ) I was listening to Deep Purples Highway Star and watching your WIP and as the engines threw out all those sparks the cymbal crashed at the end of the song, it looked and sounded very cool. Nicely done.

Chris