- Extension of 4 City Shots. - Previz, layout and initial composition of above 4 City Shots.
Extension of 4 City Shots
Workflow
Work started with modelling and texturing of the city buildings using provided references. Meanwhile, shots were camera matched and tracked. Then Placement of the buildings were done manually. Layout was then finalized by communicating with the CG Director. Then trees and other details were added.
Modeling Buildings
A rough sketchup model of the actual set and lots of reference photos were provided to us. We used those references to have a better understanding about the structure, look and the color of the buildings. It was a great challenge to actively involve in both modeling and previz process which both had the same deadline. So I built my own small toolset to recover as much as celan geometry from original sketchup file.
Legend of the Demon Cat vid 1 : Final Shots
Legend of the Demon Cat fig 1 : Tools Developed for Modeling
This image highlights 895 cylinder-shaped objects from the original SketchUp file but with very bad topology and/or unnecessarily high polygon density. It was necessary to replace all these cylinder-shaped objects with 3ds max cylinders with clean topology and necessary polygon density. It would have taken a pointless number of hours if I was to do this manually.
So, to make it easier to do, I wrote this small toolset that I just need to select any number of Cylinder shaped geometry and with a single click, all that geometry is replaced with standard Cylinder objects of 3ds Max. I can set the number of sides I need and if I can treat these Cylinders as instances. And you may also notice, the tool consists of a few more options that came in handy when working with SketchUp models.
Legend of the Demon Cat fig 2 : Some assets developed for set extentions of the movie.
Previz, Layout and Initial Composition
Workflow
On both shots 1 and 2, Camera tracking data from the tracker was imported into 3ds Max and the Camera motion has to be extended smoothly, without any effect on the smoothness of the original motion. Finding the right speed and motion took lots of iterations.
There, I wrote a small script to bake the transformation of the tracked camera on to a dummy. After that, I removed only the transformation data from the camera (leaving all animated lense data) and linked it to the dummy I mentioned above. By doing so, I was able to get a second 'layer' of animation that I can modify without effecting the original tracking data. This script snip can be found with max additional tools toolset that you can download from link below.
All the city extension layouts were done inside 3ds Max. Initial compositions were used to convey the look of the final compositions to the client. They were done inside Adobe Aftereffects.
