CE3K - Almost there. 2003-11-28 - By Dave Angelini
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John,
Thanks for the kind words and comments. CE3K came out of the "golden age"
of sci-fi movies (late 70's early 80's) when filmmakers were realizing that
SFX technology could be used to create a whole new visual vocabularly to
tell movies. But even being a classic (and considered by many to be one of
the top 100 movies of all time) I found it odd that it had never been a
subject for CG art as much as say Star Wars or Bladerunner. So I decided to
give it a shot...mostly as an excercise to try and do landscapes (face it,
the UFO's are pretty easy to model).
The tree on the right is in the foreground. Yes, I also noticed that it was
dark and the reason is simply that the plane holding the targa image of the
tree is faced more towards the camera than the UFO. As such, it is more
parallel to the rays of light coming from the UFO so it does not get fully
illuminated by them. I initially roated the tree plane slightly so that it
would be illuminated more, but then I moved it back for two reasons:
1) I liked the silhouette it forms against the background trees (artistic
preference I guess).
2) I did not want all the trees to be instanteously lighted as the UFO comes
into the scene but rather have some stay darker until the UFO passes
completely by (have the go from dark to light to dark again as the ship
moves down the road).
Also, speaking of dark trees (no not shaders)....did you notice the trees on
the horizon? Each tree is an individual plane with nothing more than the
transparency mask from the tree's targa image. Why do it this way? Well, I
wanted that slight horizon glow to stand out slightly, but considering that
it is only a Photoshop created gradient loaded into tS's background shader,
it would stick-out like postage stamp should the camera move during the
animation (e.g. the horizon would not move appropriately as the camera
moves). So I need to create the appropriate sense of parallax distortion in
the background when the camera moves. To get around this, I added the
tree-planes on the far horizon and I also used the Starfield plugin from CK
Game factory. This plugin allows you to place stars over a background image
and have those stars animate appropriately as the camera moves. So when the
stars and the trees shift appropriately as the camera moves, it takes the
curse off of the static background image. I initially tried to do this with
a single image mapped to a background sphere, but I found that the
background image needed to be pretty big because it needed to be placed far
enough away not to be illuminated by the UFO. As such, it killed render
times.
Overall, this was quite the learning experience.
Again, thanks for the link and the comments. Now off to animating (oddly
enough, this animation will be used as a Christmas message for family and
friends).
Dave Angelini
-- -- Original Message -- --
From: "John Gaubatz" <jgaubatz@(protected)>
To: <truespace@(protected)>
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2003 9:24 PM
Subject: Re: [TSML] CE3K - Almost there.
<snip>
The farthest tree on the left appears to be illuminated by the UFO, but the
tree on the right of the UFO is not illuminated as fully. Also the fence in
the background is fully illuminated. Shouldn't the tree on the right have
the same illumination or the tree on the left and the fence be illuminated a
little less as the UFO has already passed.
John
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