Development

A previously discussed there are two separate sections to this work, each is separated and designated with a distinct visual style.

The first section is a high contrast, slightly murky realism, this is applied to the city flying in, the building destruction and factory scenes.

The second style is one of highly stylised, propaganda posters. Drawing on works by early twentieth century soviet poster artists,

The styles are designed to juxtapose each other in a clear and obvious way.

The use of an unrealistic scale and developed colour palate.

Water Process

Water Water Everywhere… ok I've been pompously analytical until this point and I don't plan on trying to be humorous now (largely on the proviso that I will fail, abysmally.)

Water presented a unique problem during production, water is atrociously complex, there are a plethora of variables which effect how water will appear (in real life) Depth, amount, wind speed, current speeds, objects in the water, it's reflective, and distorts, it's transparent…all effect how water will look and how the water is perceived.

The original pre visualisation required quite a complicated simulation where an amount of debris would fall from a building into a an ocean.

I tested several software packages, to achieve this result, Real-flow and Houdini being at the forefront, but could not achieve that result with the time and processing constraints of this project.

This required, an adjustment of the framing of this scene, so that only the start and result of the destruction was visible, not the sections falling into the ocean.

This simplified matters, and in the end Maya was used to create the water using a modified ocean shader.

City Reference

In order to create more realistic and intricate models it photographed a great deal of reference material. These were objects industrial pipes, and valves, nuts and bolts, taps, grates, railings. Additionally I collected technical reference for factory equipment the form of reference documents. For the city scene, I drew, from direct observation, roof implements around Melbourne.

These gave real objects to model from. And helped both increase the speed of production and give hints to real world details that would not have existed without this reference material.

2D Animation

The 2D animation section produced it's own problems, original, during testing, a 3D "marching" rig was developed, to create a walk cycle using Maya, however this lacked the ease of control need in the model, notably in the backward bed of the leg, and the fiddley nature of working with curves.

-- Screen Capture of may walk Rig --

Eventually, Adobe Illustrator was used to create a hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation, which was then smoothed in Shake. This allowed a greater, more precise, interactive control of the curves and colour in the animation. However, this was offset with a fairly complex testing procedure, but worked fairly well as there was only one movement required of the character.

-- Animation Walk Cycle.

Production Process - An Overview

Once the story, visual style, script, pre visualisation, and bits of prior testing are all complete it is time to churn into production.

The majority of the project was created in Autodesk Maya, particularly for the "realism" scenes, where the aim was to produce as much intricate detail as possible. This is particularly obvious in the city scenes, where the buildings closest have been modelled from the ground up, and creation a level of detail that, once lit, will react in a convincing and visually dynamic manner.

The whale models were more difficult to create as they were smooth and organic, although they come with the advantage that, unlike humans characters, people do not have as great of an expression on how they should look and move. The whales were built in Maya, then sculpted in ZBrush,

The next step, which took a considerable amount of time, was to setup the lighting and shaders for each of the scenes, as mentioned previously the aim here was to createe a particular, high contrast, exciting look, and not to be particularly construed by the bounds of what is physically possible.

Once small the limited sections of animation were added, mostly to the whale, and the destroyed building. The scene was rendered and composited.

Script

Well, here is the script, as a final draft. There was significant adjustment in the script through out the project. In fact even this script does not represent the finished project.

This is largely dues to the fact that script is simply too ambitious, and there was not enough time to complete the fiddly little bits of character animation. For this reason the product demonstration section was removed.

Compositing

Compositing, an interesting (if one is so inclined) and rather technical part of computer generated graphics.

It's essentially taking all the renders for one scene and combine them (or compositing, ha ha) to make one image (or in the case of a video project, series of images).

The renders for a scene, or render passes, are different elements of a scene, for example, in the city scene, it was broken down as follows:

Hero Building (large building on the right)

Close City

Background City (the small buildings on the left)

Water Buildings

Water

And each of these are further broken down:

Shadows (only the background)

Diffuse (light hitting a surface)

Specular (shiny parts, such as metal, which reflect light)

Ambient Occlusion (how close things are together)

Beauty (a complete render)

And, well you get the idea.

Why...

Mainly, in my case, control, and to save time re-rendering. By breaking the scene down into sections, it gives an opportunity to adjust each part separately, and without re-rendering the entire scene, which is quite time consuming.

I may want to bring out the foreground building, or I notice that some buildings are being hidden by shadows. The subtle adjustments offered by rendering in layers, and compositing later make minor changes far easier.