Character/Environment: German Soldier, Ruins
 

My wife was a bit unhappy that I scrapped this after neglecting her and my son while I did it so I've promised to show whats left. This was done to learn about compositing and a bit more about LW to improve my employability. LOL.

Rendered in Lightwave, comped in AE. Only the character, tank and the exhaust is rendered 'properly'. The rest are sky boxes and plates. No radiosity, HDRI or fancy shaders. All shadowmapped spotlights. I tried some SSS shaders for the skin but rendering was too long on what was then a P2 300. Multiple layers for the comping to allow for the backgrounds to be animated, recoloured and whatever. Lots of errors and problems and I wouldn't do it the same way again.

Taken from a 3 minute animation for which I also started to record the music.

another. Lots of layers. Cloads, background smoke, reflections, various layers of building, multiple layers of foreground smoke, flames. All on game type skyboxes (except smoke).

again ..

T34 Tank. Its got fully articulated tracks, wheels and suspension. tracks were tricky as conventional morphing required too many targets to be practical. Background is a plate. Smoke, flames and sky animated.

You can see how rough some of the photoshopping is. The wood infront of the tracks is a quick stroke in photoshop (am I allowed to say that?)

Layers .. room and tank are rendered, the mid ground tree, rubble and outhouse are on one layer, the buildings on another and the sky on another.

Not much to say really. The background is a composite of about 4 renders. I couldn't make up my mind so fudged them in AE.

This ones included to show some of the dodgy photoshopping and problems caused by the skybox approach. The rubble outside the window is a mixture of photo and painting. Mostly painting. Also see how its stretched near the wall ..

nothing short of amazing.. awesome work man!

What can I say? I'm stunned. That is incredible work.

It's also nice to see that you've got enough of a critical eye to be able to spot fault with your own stuff. Sometimes it's too easy to lose that when you're close to a project.

However, I do think you're maybe being a little too critical of yourself here! :)

NO WAY! :D :D :D

Holy Guacamole!! I am awed both by your superb skill and by your ability to still see room for improvement. All of the shots of the ruins and of the tank have this oil painted look, very powerful.

I can't wait to see the full movie!

truly awesome work! I particularly like the exterior shots. With a tad less contrast, saturation and grain they would be at least TV feature quality!

I think the colors are actually the weakest part: try to colorcorrect all the layers to bond them together.

You might as well try and make it all brighter; these black masses do build some suspense, but it's overdone a bit.

Really great work, and even more impressive as you found your own way.

Care to show the layers before compositing them?

Nice!
Batllefield style!

But the little soldiers hidious (in a ugly way)
Make them hansome

Philip,

The colour and contrast is a major problem. On my monitor at home they look great with a very nice cold blue cast and I did a lot of work to get them looking just the way I wanted. But when I brought them into to work in order to post they had very little contrast and had a majenta cast. Very frustrating. I thought my monitor at home was set up properly for doing TV stuff but maybe not. I won't really know without seeing them on a PAL TV which isn't likely to happen. I'll try and dig out some layers for you. Much of its been binned to make space.

CheesEV .. Sorry the movies won't be finished. This was part 2. Part 1 got to the stage of render tests for fx and I found a raytracing bug in hypervoxels that tech support never really got to the bottom of. It may be fixed in 7 and more recent versions but I'm still on LW 6.5 so can't confirm. But I left part 1 and thought part 2 would be a straight forward diversion while I waited for a fix. The final part 3 never got out of my head onto paper.

If you can't see the faults in your own work you're not going to improve on them and since these were done quite a while ago its even easier to criticise. At the end of the day, once a personal piece of work is finished/abandoned its only use is to fill out your portfolio and to remind you where you screwed up (or, when you look back on it, make you realise how much you've improved). The stuff you're learnt in the process is much more important than the work itself.

And as you get older (I'm a young and attractive 35 :-) your perspective changes. In 6 years time when XBox 3 is out, the stuff I've learnt doing the animation may be of some use in games but realistically these are just pics that took up time that would have been better spent with my wife and son.

icezAz,

Ugly? I kind of thought about him as normal. The way most soldiers are. An ordinary guy that'd rather be at home with his family than dieing in someone elses war. The three stories were all based during the retreat through Russia in 43/44 and no there was no political message in any of them. I'm just interested in the Eastern Front and doing an animation about something I'm interested in helped with my motivation.

The first story was on the Kalmuk Steppes. The one you see I thought of being in about March 43, around maybe Kharkov and the ideas I had for the third one would have placed it in a small Ukrainian village. He's escaping from the chaos and panic caused by the fall of Stalingrad. He's weaponless, not eaten or slept properly for weeks. If he doesn't get killed by the Russians he'll be executed by the MP's because he's lost his unit.

In the first he survives being almost crushed by a tank, in this one he survives being blown up and in the third he freezes to death. All very jolly family entertainment.

So while you may think of him as ugly, I think of him as used.

Philip,

Heres a sample of some of the layers that get used in AE. I'm trying to remember the order off the top of my head .. there's nothing revolutionary.
Back to front ..

D .. burnt out so you don't actually get to see alot of the detail.
E .. animated when rendered and dissplaced and twisted a bit in AE to fake some movement.
D .. another comp for the water reflection with the sky garbage masked out.
A .. this was for the background buildings.
G .. a layer of smoke between some buildings.
A masked with B .. to layer it over the smoke.
F .. the tank smoke
There was also some animated flames here but they got lost when I decided to crop the top and bottom.
A masked with C to put the tank infront of the smoke.
I can't remember if I used H which is a spec map.
Theres also another layer of full frame smoke blowing R-L but you don't see it until halfway through the pan.

Various layers are also duplicated for bloom etc..

Guys theres a bit of duplication here so if you also want to check out the Newtek forums theres some extra pics there. I got a bit carried away initially and flooded both so I'll post between the two.

Cheers and thanks.

well, i can see why u got carried away :) this stuff is just bloody good! (as i said in newtek forum too..hehe...)

man, u should do some game-levels with all these war games coming out lately...but dont forget ur kid and wife :) ...they are much more important than this computing-live....ahem...

i allready see myself wandering in your levels just enjoying myself with this pure piece of art.



Cheers,

-EsH-

OUTSTANDING work!

I have 3 year old triplet sons, and I only work on my personal 3D stuff when they're asleep. You can't get that time with them back. :) :) :)

Your work is amazing. I'm happy to hear you'll be spending more time with your children in this early stage of their life. :) :) :)

From one father to another
Peter

holy crap.....that's all I have to say.......well maybe another one.... holy crap.