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.