Up Above Down Below; Final Piece

Not so happy with this one, there's a lot more I wanted to do with it but didn't leave enough rendering time. The lighting could have been better, there could have been more in the scene, the speed needed to be regulated at the start and I didn't get to put in my big finish, which was to change the camera view at the end towards the earth to see it be blown up by the giant space invader.

Animation: Grass

Just modelled some grass and animated it. Used scatter to create the grass, then animated it with volume select and multiple wave modifiers to vary the movement.

Its the same piece of animation, only the second video has its speed reduced to x1/4 and had a light put into the scene.

Modelling: International Space Station

This is a piece I modelled for the visualisation project "Up Above Down Below", it's a slight adaptation of the International Space Station, the adaptation being I havn't put in the scaffolding around as it looked better without, and the textures are different.

It is available to download from TurboSquid HERE

Cinema: Avatar

"The world shown in Avatar is fleshed out in such detail and scope that you really feel like you're in a place that exists" - Dan Lemmon (FX supervisor, Weta Digital

After seeing the film twice in 3D I couldn't agree more. The environments in the film have such depth it does seem like you could step into any scene, whether it be the lush forests of Pandora or the futuristic human base camp.

However, as astonishing as the world of Pandora looks, the inhabitants blow that all away. The main race of humanoids that make up the film are called the Na'vi, and are the most complex characters ever created. They have multiple skin tissue layers, as well as tendon sheets to create realistic dynamic flesh, however the faces of the characters are even more complicated. Weta used HD cameras to capture their actors facial expressions, then using their in-house software created a map of muscle firings for expressions and converted it into motion data that could be applied to the Na'vi. They would then compare Na'vi expressions to the actor expressions and tweak whatever they needed to. Also worth mentioning, to create wrinkles in the skin of the Na'vi, instead of using traditional methods of adding them in a displacement map (allowing them to simply dissolve in and out) they were actually sculpted into the models, allowing for skin to squash together to form the wrinkle. The characters are full of little techniques such as this.

At A Glance:

• Large trees in the forests had up to 1.2 million polygons each.
• 1,852 total shots1,818 animated shots
• 900 crew at peak 
• Crew from 46 different countries, spread across 6 locations
• The larger shots of Pandora had more than 1,000 digital assets, excluding characters
• More than 1,900 digital assets were created
• Some of the larger shots had use between 5-50 billion polygons
• Around 10TB of data generated per day
• 483 unique plants, with geometry and texture modifications there are over 3,000 variations
• 53 unique Na'vi characters with over 100 variations
• 25 unique vehicles
• 21 unique creatures created, with texture modifications there are 68 variations
• 90 unique environments - 1,500 shot specific terrain pieces/elements to make these up
• 4,352 rendering machines 
• 34,816 CPU cores
• 104TB of RAM

Of Bots And Bananas; Final Piece

I'm fairly happy with this, there's a few things I would have liked to have done better, such as putting in a more noticable jolt of the shoulders in the walk cycle, and sound effects, but as a whole I'm happy with it.