Thanks for the comments and ideas guys! I’m hoping to get some solid time over easter to keep working on this 
FXWARS! THE RACE: Richard Nichols
tibes
#17
Lman
#18
the design is nice are you goung to add a shaper looking evil craft aswell that be cool.
nice work bro.
tibes
#19
Spent a bit of time tonight and last night trying to figure out how to do the environment. I’ve attempted city-scapes before and given up with all the effort that’s required, but I really visualise this race happening around the roof-tops of the city, inter-twining the sky-scapers. I’m trying to reduce the amount of detail required, by keeping the buildings in fog and silhouette as much as possible. Using a few custom-made hero buildings and eki’s citygen script I think I’m getting closer.
I’ll try building the road and placing the buildings around and see whether it comes together.
The first one is a more “normal” render, with some photoshop filtering:
The second is more of an experiment, using layer blending to “fade away” the buildings that are close leaving only black. I think this might look interesting in an animation, so I might give it a test run once I have the track together to see how it looks (ignore the speeder in the frame, I would composite these separately):
The plan is to have four bikes (essentially all the same, of differing colours) in the race. The crash will involve one bike having mechanical problems which results in an epic pile up!
tibes
#22
Thanks Matthew! The track supports I’ve added probably make it look even more “starwars-y”, but I guess at least I’m drawing on a good source 
Here’s a track fly-through I render last night, I’m adding some details today to make it seem more alive, hoping to finish off the racers as well, so I can block out shots tomorrow.
tibes
#23
Worked a lot on the refining the city, and relighting it and adding bits and pieces to make it more interesting and “alive”. I’m trying to make the city as “finished” as possible so I can just use it in every shot without too much tweaking. The foreground animation will be enough effort without having to worry about the city backdrop, so hopefully the extra effort now with be worthwhile.
The city is around 500000 polys at this stage, and I’ve got around 25-30 lights. Render times at lo-res with no AA is around 5 seconds in LW9, so still manageable. Hope it remains that way
Edit: Did this little test too, not sure whether I’ll use something like in the final anim, but just playing with some ideas. QT7 Support Smash
Escopos
#24
Your stuff is looking realy nice man. I’m enjoying watching your progress … way ahead of me by the way! hehe:thumbsup:
mustan9
#26
Oh my god! Tell me about it. We’re not even one week into this things and he’s already rendering 40 seconds of track flybys.
Very nice work tibes! I like everything.
The light needs work, because it looks like a video game but if that’s your worst problems your way ahead of me.
tibes
#27
Thanks everyone for the kind words!
I agree about the videogame look, I realised this after seeing the animation output yesterday morning. The animation initially was front-lit with the lighting rig parented to the camera. I thought this might be an easy solution for the lighting (which it was) but it looked very much like a videogame. I spent the rest of last night re-lighting the whole city with 30-40 point lights with fall-off and an overall moon-light. After looking at last night's render I'm much more pleased with the result. It's not the most realistic city in the world, but I'm pretty happy with the mood so far. Part of the problem with having a lot of dark reflective structures is that there isn't much scope for shadows to show up, but that's a trade off to avoid having to add a lot of detailed modelling and textures I guess. :D
Next, I'll finish off the vehicles, and if I have time, add some smaller props to the city before starting the sequence.
Here’s last night’s animation. And for fun, another still shot… I’m placing a few nice looking cameras around the city so I can choose from some “pre-selected” angles when composing the shots.
[img]http://www.munkipants.com/fxwars/city4a.jpg[/img]
[](http://www.munkipants.com/fxwars/ft3.mov)
destruct007
#31
DUDE! SWEET! Wow you are going all out, man I kind of want to help you do yours but instead I’ll offer you this sugestion add fluid clouds, take a generic cluod from the visor and take the rez and scale in Y and increasie it to fill the top of your city scape and below the road, or all inbetween if you raise the transparency! It will add details in the fog, and hide the distance that you can’t get to textureing to the N th degree.
Keep it up this is looking sweeeet!!!
tibes
#32
What race would be complete without… Pit Babes!!
[img]http://www.munkipants.com/fxwars/pitbabe2.jpg[/img]
(I realise I'm probably getting a little carried away at this point... but what the hell... pit babes! :bounce: )
mustan9
#35
Your characters look great.
The skin needs a little work, but skin always looks a little off in cg. It’s very hard.
The shoulder joint on the girl looks a little high. You may want to lower it closer to the arm bit for better deformation when she raises and lowers her arm, but it may not matter because if the camera doesn’t get very close.
I’m glad to see someone else doing characters for their entry.
I think your doing just the right amount of work in the right areas.
tibes
#36
Cheers! Yeah the shoulder deformation is more of a problem with the model and the base pose. I’ve adjusted the model to be more neutral in the base pose and this has fixed most of the shoulder problems. I might do some corrective morphs for the shoulder and elbow if they look bad in the animation, but for now I won’t bother.
I’ve added some thigh-high boots though…
