FXWars!, Raygun, Gotmilk, FREEFORM ENTRY

#1

Hello partners.

I have been participating in this contest almost a week but i never had a time to create my FX thread.

In my animation the raygun is being tested in secret facility. Gun is being aimed at the moon. When the beam is being shot then seconds later the raygun explodes.

You can download the first draft animatics from www.my-face.co.uk/teslafx.avi

Since we are all in tight deadline then i go start adding detail, lighting and materials next.
If you have any suggestions for my animatics then tell me. Otherwise i move on because there is a lot of material to cover :slight_smile:

EDIT: Almost forgot. The terrain model is downloaded from the Lighthouse lighting challenge. It was created by the Juan Carlos Silva.

#2

Sounds good! Keen to see your final entry :thumbsup:

#3

Looks great. Good to see you are in. Looking forward to more additions to your wip.

#4

Hey man cool idea, good luck with it!

#5

Man, I wish I could have put my animatic together this quickly!

Pace is really good on this (camera moves are nice, fluid and natural too), but I’m kind of thinking that there’s a LOT of anticipation for the blast, but it’s ending very abruptly to my taste, in comparison to how slowly the environment is revealed. I’m curious what’s motivating the gun, too (what’s it shooting at?).

I like the design of the gun quite a bit!

Keep it up!

–T

#6

Thanks guys. Your kind comments gives me motivation to push on and finish this project.

A little update. I finished the shack modeling. Now i move on the raygun and the dome building.

#7

Cool model, I’m going for the delapodated look as well! Look forward to seeing more! Good luck to you.

#8

A quick update. I now finished all the models and locked down the final animatics (with sound).

You can download it from www.my-face.co.uk/audio.avi

I am sorry about the file size.

Now i am going to move on to lighting and materials. I am a bit scared because i do not have much experience in these fields and i want to make it look good.

#9

Agreed, nice model! Seem’s everybody likes the derelict buildings for this one! Totally fits the vintage theme of Tesla. Good luck with the texturing and lighitng, feel free to ask for some pointers if you need any help Good luck!

#10

This is the visual look i am going for. I used MR daylight system to simulate a night.

Now i have to get the rest of the scenes look that way too. Then starts the render process. After that i take videos to after effects and add effects to places where needed.

I shall use AE to add motion blur (much faster this way)

I am not sure about the depth of field and how it works in mental ray :blush:

#11

You can do depth of field in mental ray with either the physical_lens dof shader or the lens_bokeh shader (I prefer the look of bokeh), but be warned that it’s really really really expensive in terms of render time if you want a reasonably smooth result (particularly for pronounced dof). If you haven’t accounted for that yet, I’d suggest rendering a z-depth pass and using lens blur in AE to cheat your depth of field. It’ll be way way faster. That’s what I normally do.

Here’s a good visual guide on the bokeh shader’s settings if you want to play with it:

http://2cos3d.net/blog1/?page_id=775

You basically atttach it to your camera as a lens shader, set the “plane” to the distance between the camera and subject, push render and get a grainy slow-rendering mess that you have to tune an awful lot until it’s smooth enough to fix in post. But the results are pretty awesome.

–T

#12

Thank you Trey.

I tried out DoF with MR and it slowed down render times dramatically. So i choose to make DoF in AE like you suggested.

Here are some screens from shot1 and shot2. :slight_smile:

EDIT: I now realized what was disturbing me on shot1. I shall remove the ground from the background due the size and it gives the illusion of miniature model set :wip:

Anyway i am off to sleep :slight_smile:
Good night.

#13

It is finished (almost).

    [img]http://www.animootor.com/tesla/splash.jpg[/img]
    
    
    
    One shot is replaced by animatic. I have the unfinished shot rendered out but i had no chance to add it in. I know that the deadline is friday night but the problem is that i have to be at work today for 16 hours. So i probably wont be able to sit behind my computer until tomorrow. 
    
    Animation link: [[color=white][color=darkorange][/color][/color]](http://www.animootor.com/tesla/KAREL_FXWARS%281024X465%29.mov)[color=white][color=darkorange][b][http://www.animootor.com/tesla/KAREL_FXWARS(1024X465).mov](http://www.animootor.com/tesla/KAREL_FXWARS%281024X465%29.mov)[/b][/color][/color][color=white][color=darkorange][b]
    
    Stream: [/b][/color][/color][color=white][color=darkorange][b][http://vimeo.com/3978132](http://vimeo.com/3978132)[/b][/color][/color][color=white][color=darkorange][b]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioSGtF7_dug

(stream has no sound lag)

    I learned 3 important thing about this project. First: Dont take the bite you cannot chew. The animation was too long and rendering times were awful. 
    
  Second: Planning!!! My work flow was so messy. One day i did one thing and other day i did another thing.  My scene files were on 3dsMax folder but my other asset files (material, sounds) were scattered all over the computer. (mostly on desktop :D ) 
  
Third: I have to get better computer.
    
    Since i made a raygun then i did not find a need to have a lot of electrical FX in it (ok the truth is that i dont know how to make a FX. But i hope that course with Allan McKay helps me get better in this field :))
    
    Anyway thats it. Thank you everyone who commented on my wip and see you in future contest.
    
    PM. Very special thanks goes to my girlfriend who helped me out on this project.
    [/b][/color][/color]
#14

Alright! You made it. Yeah …lots of lessons to learn. Exactly why I am doing these.
Congrats!

#15

Cheers Dollarman :slight_smile:

A little update. I now managed to remove my animatic scene and replaced it with real shot. And the sound lag problem has been fixed as well.

#16

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.