Middle East Animations

[davemcd]

Above are some frames from some recently completed animations, done with max and Vray.

Here is the link to the animations. They are DivX 6.2.2

http://clients.lastpixel.com.au/folio

Cheers

DaveMcD

[CT]

Dave,

These animations are truely amazing and a credit to those who worked on the project. I check them out on the DLF earlier.
The water effects and the trees are great, and the animated people have a natural looking walk compared to most I've seen.
Looks like a serious amount of geometry in the scenes. Any chance of shedding some light on how these were done and the number of people involved.

Chris.

[vince_1972]

Wonderful job, it's fantastic

Thanks for sharing your job

Vince

[davemcd]

Dave,

These animations are truely amazing and a credit to those who worked on the project. I check them out on the DLF earlier.
The water effects and the trees are great, and the animated people have a natural looking walk compared to most I've seen.
Looks like a serious amount of geometry in the scenes. Any chance of shedding some light on how these were done and the number of people involved.

Chris.

They were both done in 3DSMax with Vray. The team all up was about 14 ppl on the Auto Logistics City stuff including project management and editors etc. Some of the modelling and animation we contracted out but all the rendering was done in house (contractors are included in the number of ppl tho). Some of the car models were purchase models that we fixed up and turned into vray proxies for faster rendering. A fair bit of post was done on these renders, mainly colour grading tho. Motion blur of the track scenes was done with reel smart motion blur rather than rendered. This project was done is a very quick turn around ,not sure I'm allowed to say how quickly we did it, then it becomed expected all the time

For the Al Raha one it was about 8 -10 ppl i think, for about 5 weeks or so. The client supplied most of the large buildings which we got working with vray, we built all the landscaping, detailing, waterways etc... basically anythign thats not a big building. The boats and some of the ppl were purchase models, the walking was some fairly standard mocap. Most of the ppl are static vray proxies with only a few actually walking. Water was pretty much the vraymtl with fog in the shader just tweaked nicely and displacement for the wakes. Palm trees and lots of plants we made ourselves, some speedtrees were used as well.

Fairly standard vray set up and lighting. Using irradience map with QMC second bounces and linear lighting.

[gadzooks]

Holy @#$%!! Three questions?
1. where are you guys?
2. who are you guys?
3. are you hiring?
Great Job well done!!! Gadzooks

[ene.xis]

i am speecheless....

[tricky]

Very well done. It would be great if you could explain a little more how you went about doing the wakes and the foaming water around the moving boats.

[ene.xis]

and on the water lines, small water falls....im still drowling....

[armilla]

WOW, great work on a truely impressive scale!

Did you model your walking Arab people, or purchase them? I've not had any luck to date in finding 3d people in Arab dress to buy, so any info would be appreciated.

[Pixelab]

Truly amazing Job ! I'm speechless

And the real question you won't answer is ... how much do you ask ?

[Da_elf]

well im pretty much blown away ay the scale of this

[davemcd]

Cheers guys.

I'll try to answer a few question briefly.

gadzooks:
1. we are in Perth Western Australia.
2. Erm... just some guys. A couple of us have been around the traps for a fairly long while but hiding here in Perth so no-one knows us
3. Not sure if we are hiring right this second... but we're growing pretty rapidly, so the chances of hiring soon are high.

tricky: I think I'm going to get asked this one a lot. I cant go into to much detail at the moment as I'll probably elaborate more on this at some later date but here's a brief rundown:

The foam is all done as a pre-prepared animated map. It was made back in max 5 or 6 by fellow co-hort (tho really my boss now i suppose) Rick Grigsby. It was superspray and deflectors and other craziness then some after effects work on it. We use it heaps.Wake shape is a simple texture map as a vray displacement. Both are made to fit together and a crazy composite map setup is made in max with each composite having a different UV channel. This allows many boats to be on the water, each with its own displacement map and foam map. The UV channels are planar projects the size of the wake and are wired to dummys to control the position. All in all a dodgy hack that looks kind nice in the end.

armilla: Arab model is a funny story. Its actually a repurposed low poly model I made of myself years ago. I repainted the skin tones, and remodelled the clothing. I made a higher res cloth and generated normal maps and textures from that for the low poly. Its an in house joke that its arabian dave running around our scenes. In the car animation is a higher res arab model (not based on me) that I modelled quickly a few months ago.

Pixelab: hehe.. yeah cant really answer that. We probably charge more than most our immediate competitors for stuff like this.

Da_elf: yeah they are usually freakin huge and often painful to work on. A lot of it is flying by the seat of our pants and working hard to make it all render in the end. without vray proxies and some in house scripts we would be stuffed. Large scale stuff is a killer

DaveMcD

[thablanch]

The scale of this, wow

I guess it is all rendered in one pass, on a single machine overnight..
Seriously, what is the horsepower behind all of that

[dlparisi]

It keeps going, and going, and going.... Impressive.

[tricky]

I believe it was rendered on a network of eight ZX-81 machines over an 11 hour period. Am I right?