FINAL ENTRY: WHEN WE LEFT EARTH

This is my final video for Its Art – When We Left Earth challenge.

WIP Thread can be found here. http://www.itsartmag.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=2802
Everything is made in 3dsmax using, Scanline and Mental Ray.
Photoshop for texturing.
After Effects and Premiere Pro for Post and Clipping.

This has been a really fun project were I have used alot of my time experimenting with different type of solutions and problem solving.
I have learned alot by doing this project, which also is my main goal when I entering such challenges.

This time there were Rigging and Animation that was my main focus, mostly animation, this is the fun part 🙂
So 20% of the time went to rigging. 10% for modeling, texturering and rendring and 70% for animation.

I would normaly spend more time with modeling and rendring. But for once I felt like spending most of my time animating.

Key problems I had:

Skinning: I had really hard time getting the shoulder to deform correctley. This was solved by editing my mesh by lifting and scaling part of the shoulder.

Skateboard: This was the hardest part of the whole rigging process. The skateboard needed multiply Pivot points. ( One on every wheel, body rotation, trucker rotation, horizontal rotation, vertical rotation etc. ):
This was solved by parenting Bones and Reactor Manager. The bone for Pivot Points and also different Points for pivots. Reactor Manager was used for tilting and Ollie (Skateboard Jump)
Then there were different controls for making the board flip and rotate.

Storytelling: This is something I didnt spend enough time on. This Is were I learned how IMPORTANT there is for having your storyboard done before doing anything else!
I started out with, I just want to make a skateboarder having fun and skating. But then.. Even I cant understand whats going on here. So I had to find a way to tell my story with what I got.
I didnt have the to recreate everything I already made. So it ended up on a sort of Silent Film look a like, with help from text boards telling my story with animation.
I wish I coud turn back time and start out with a storyboard. So too my next short, I want my Storyboard done before I do anything else. No matter how long it will take.

Rendering time:
I started out with using Vray as render engine, but cause of the time I wanted to use more time on my animation so I had to find another way to render my film out.
After some test renders and mixing and trixing I ended up with using Mental Ray and Scanline for rendering. I used Mental Ray for mostly every scenes, but the sky and clouds I used Scanline, sinse this was a really simpel scene it rendered out the scene faster. Also the particles are scanline.

Treatment:
A skater is to busy skating so he forgot that he actually should be on the ship, he is skating in the skatepark and suddenly he hear and feel this rumbling. It`s suddenly coming to his mind that they are evacuating the earth and he shoud be on that ship. So he takes his board and tries to make it.

When he reaches the lift off point, it`s to late.
In the confusing moment of “missing the evacuation” he look around, and see a smaller rocket, he finds out that he want to make him his own rocket to join the rest of the humanity.
He strap on the his customized rocket to his skateboard, and setting off for the stars to join the rest

HAPPY ENDING!!

Duration: 99

Likes: 8

Viewed:

source