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View Full Version : vehicle / environment: Koolama - "The Forgotten Mutiny?"

davemcd
08-12-2003, 05:08 PM
Hi All,

I've just finished work on a project where we had to create several shots for a documentary. The documentary was about a ship called the "Koolama" which was an Australian merchant ship which was sunk by the Japanese off the coast of WA during WWII. Basically it was bombed while running supply lines but they managed to beach it in shallow water (flat bottomed hull for travelling river systems etc) patched it up over several days and several of the crew sailed it a few hundred kilometers to the nearest port, using only alternating twin propellers to try and steer it (as the steering was damaged). Meanwhile the 130 or so passengers and crew etc travelled overland for 5 days through WA's extremely rough and inhospitable terrain to the nearest settlement. The final piece will be on australia's ABC sometime in October.

Our brief was to create several establishing and travelling shots as well as a bombing sequence etc. It was a fairly budget job so there are plenty more things i would have liked to include to make it a bit more believeable. However the client was thrilled with the work and all in all i'm pretty happy with the results.

The boat and jetty were modelled in Rhino and 3DS Max by Rick Grigsby and the rendering was done in lightwave. Parts of the animation were done in Max as that was what i'd done the pre-vis for signoff in. Everything else was done by myself and Chris Dardis

http://www.blinkworks.com.au/images/koolama/shot01A_02.jpg

for the rest of the images (21 in all) plus a small movie (well its 4 meg, but only 240 x 180) please check out:

the Koolama Gallery - yes this is a link, click on it (http://www.blinkworks.com.au/pages/koolama_gallery.html)

Cheers,

DaveMcD
friendlymike
08-12-2003, 07:21 PM
great job :thumbsup:

production time ?
jeffkantoku
08-12-2003, 11:06 PM
Is it a three-island steamer, often called a tramp steamer?

I'm interested because I wrote a screenplay which features a three-island steamer and I want to visualize it.

-Jeff
davemcd
08-13-2003, 01:53 AM
Friendlymike: Job was done over a 2 month period pretty much where about the first month was not really very busy (just doing pre-vis stuff and getting hold of the project details, plans etc) the last month was about 3 weeks solid with myself essentially full time on it and my business partner part time on it. The boat modelling was done externally in about a week or so by a friend of mine who was an expert at boat modelling (he modelled Greg Normans boat 'Aussie Rules' which was used for construction).

A lot of time was wasted due to hardware limitations (me waiting around for my slow PC to figure stuff out) and few human errors which resulted in having to re-render probably half the scenes. Plus i was getting the scenes rendered elsewhere as well and lost about a day or two a week in travel and copy times...

jeffkantoku: I'm pretty sure this isnt one of those. I dont have the ship specs on me right now (they are in my car) but i'm pretty sure its not one of those.... :)


Cheers,

DaveMcD
dimitrios_c
08-13-2003, 06:40 AM
Nice work, looks almost real...almost I say? Well here are my crits...there needs to be more interaction, perhaps a frothy effect where the boat makes contact with the water. The part where the boat is in shallow water (I assume) it looks like a toy boat, perhaps because of the way the depth of the water is presented. Impressive all round though... :applause:
davemcd
08-13-2003, 06:58 AM
yeah well spotted dimitrios... we got some way towards having a particle effect along the side of the boat but due to a few problems with it and time constraints it had to be dropped :(.

As for the shallow water one. I think its a little exacerbated by not quite right lighting and the distance of the camera to the boat. Also because the crux of this shot was to show that the boat was pretty much resting on the bottom i had to make the water refraction a lot lower than water really is so that when the camera is flat to the water you can still see the hull fairly visible..... But yeah l definitely agree it looks a little toyish.... again like you said the whole thing is *almost* real. There are some definite abvious tells that its not. The client though was thrilled considering the budget on it, they've indicated they weren't expecting anywhere near the amount of work and detail that went into it.

Cheers

DaveMcD
Locutus
08-13-2003, 11:19 PM
WHat did you use to create the water?
dimitrios_c
08-14-2003, 01:48 AM
The client though was thrilled considering the budget on it, they've indicated they weren't expecting anywhere near the amount of work and detail that went into it.

Yes, exceeding clients expectations is the main thing. It would be ideal to spend as much time as it takes to get it right but this is the real world huh.....

WHat did you use to create the water?

3D software silly...lol :scream:
davemcd
08-14-2003, 03:45 AM
Locutus: the water was merely a mesh with a static displacement map for the wake with another layer of procedural displacement for some undulation. Then there were a couple of layers of crumple map as bump (all in lightwave).

Dimitrios: yeah i had big ambitions at the start of this project about all the neat things i could do and try, the reality kicked in and i had to do what was needed then add bits and pieces as time came up....

DaveMcD
paintbox
08-31-2003, 01:09 PM
Great work there, especially since this production work, I can imagine you would WANT to add more detail, but can't because time/money runs out.
davemcd
08-31-2003, 02:18 PM
Cheers Paintbox. Yeah we really had to try to stop ourselves from going overboard (doh! bad pun) Although we already did put in much more effort than the budet and time would usually warrant.

It was a fun job though and we kind of figured the extra effort we put in was more of a re-investment to a certain degree. We've had a pretty good response from this job and looks like it will lead to some other interesting work.

DaveMcD
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