Below is our latest showreel plus one of our recent dubai projects for Palm Jebel Ali.
This project was done in 3ds Max v.9 with Vray 1.5. It included a green screen shoot which involved stitching different takes together into seemless passes using a ‘fake’ motion control technique.
The project was completed in 6 weeks with 5 people (about 10 people on the green screen shoot day tho)
Render times were usually under 5 mins per frame on 8 core blade servers.
Some of the grades are a little out as is some of the keying which I’m a little dissapointed in but such are the perils of commercial projects with defined deadlines. 3 days before delivery the client wanted change our original water to a brighter more turqoise version which I feel didnt look as real or as nice.
I’ve been trying to write a reply without simply swearing.
I don’t think I can…
F*** me, that’s an enormous amount of work!
Really, really nice job. Some of the compositing doesn’t work too well, but considering the logistics of shooting & matching people in a 6 week production schedule it’s still not bad. The car shot works really well in fact.
Galactacus: Yeah it was all GI but calculate every 25th etc. Most shots were usually just a single render (So not passes). The car shot had the car rendered in 3 parts; the road and buildings etc, exterior of the car, interior of the car.
Hopefully no-one noticed the strange double layered audio track that ended up in the Palm Jebel Ali clip I posted. Somehow a phantom audio track got encoded over the top. I’ve updated it now, but how embarrassing to upload that. Apparently it was downloaded 4000 times over the weekend :0
Aha… We do use saved calculations but we do some dodgy tricks with a lot of the moving objects. All the people and moving cars (unless they are right in the foreground) are excluded from GI. They just have their own old school lightring of direct lights that only include the moving objects to fake the ambient sky light and still get lit by the scenes main direct light. Sometimes you can tell there is no GI on them but most people are too busy being distracted by all the nice GI on the buildings
If its a key feature object in the scene… say the main car it will be rendered in another pass with GI calculated every frame, all the other objects set to matte shadow. If the key object is very reflective then everything it reflects will basically calculate GI every frame so I cheat by excluding all the matte shadow objects from GI and do some basic standard lighting on them to make them illuminated enough that the reflections look bright enough. I dont think anyone has looked at any of the reflections and noticed there was no GI in a building that is reflected in the body of a car.
All cheap hacks but they get the renders done and no-one tends to notice that we cheated.
what kind of trees are you using ?? Sorry im used to using vray proxies from evermotion libraries and im trying to get a start with billboarding trees seems like it would save a lot of rendering time. Anywhere you can refer me or maybe just give me some pointers on where to start seeems like you work with them very well.
The trees are a mix of Onyx trees made into vray proxies, and some other plants and trees we modelled ourselves. I havent used billboard trees in years, especially now with being able to make stuff into vray proxies I find that billboards just don’t look that great.
amazing work man, did you also do all the moddeling in those 6 weeks ?
perhpas you can share a bit how such a large project unfolds.
proberly you start with an storyboard, etc
Heya, we had some assets like cars, people, boats, trees etc that are part of our library. But all the buildings, parks and masterplans were made during the project. In fact the buildings that are used on the main island were modeled and textured and made into vray proxies ready to render in about 2 days (there are only 8 different types of them). The buildings were pretty much designed as they were built using a few style photos for reference. The modeler made a few quick macros up to speed things up like automatically creating glass panels and railings for each floor once you fed it the base slab (mostly just copy and paste from the macro recorder with some minor script tweaks)
The masterplan for the roads and the other islands in the palm took one of our guys about 3 weeks I think.
Most of our cameras are from the masterplan level which is one master file with a bunch of generic stuff going on around the place like cars driving and point cache animations of people walking around in straight lines (randomly placed around by hand)
Only specific detailed scenes are there own files which are detailed modifications of the masterplan scene.
While the modelling was being started I was knocking out all the previs (using the client supplied blocking model from sketchup). we had a very rough storyboard which was done by the marketing arm of the client. IN the first couple of weeks we worked closely with them pitching our concepts of what we could do for the budget and worked back and forth, they did a rough storyboard to pitch to the end client but we relied more on blocking stuff out in previs to figure out the flow. We especially needed to figure out how the filming component would work as we only had a limited studio space and green screen size.
The filming all took place on one 10 hour day, 23 separate shots with 8 different set-ups… some stills from the shoot can be seen here Last Pixel | Flickr
Once the modeling was done we refined our cameras and added other ones that looked good.
Post including 3D Tracking took about 3 weeks with myself and the editor.
That looked quite funny.
