Rendering, comping in Eyeon Fusion and final render.

I have worked a long time to reach this point, and it has first and foremost been a very good learning experience for me. As a VFX student my focus has been to integrate models onto film footage, but to make myself more flexible on the market, it is a good idea to know how to make a model from scratch.

I have learned a ton underway, especially how you should make a proper mesh to avoid artifacts in programs like Mudbox. In my previous post, you can see how I fixed normal map artifacts with an extemely useful photoshop plug in, the "Nvidia re-normalizer". One of my tutors in uni mentioned this plugin in class, and I always take notes of small things like this, because knowing that tools like this exists saves you a sea of time.

I had fun experimenting with the materials in 3DS Max, and it took some time to make the dirt shader even though there was a few tutorials online, most were from old versions of max, and the mental ray materials have changed a lot in just a few versions.

EYEON FUSION 6

I put together all my passes like I have done in similar projects, only this time I played around with an RGB matte because it gives a lot of freedom and in some situations saves time instead of having to use using several normal black and white mattes. The alpha layer can also be used, so that is four masks in one.

Here is the final render, I have put the thing in a hangar and added some skylights to drop some shadows on it. I feel that i have pushed the limit of what is possible on a laptop, but it was worth it.

So here it is, though I might use it in a VFX shot on some future occasion!

Independence Day alien attacker render from Andreas Fjell on Vimeo.

Texturing the beast

After a quite a few hours of mudboxing and realising that my mesh have quite a lot of "rat nests" and shoddy structure, I finally manage to produce something that resemble an acceptable result without having to re-model the whole thing.

(from the look of the ship in the movie, the whole craft has spots of a sort of goosebump like texture)

But even though the diffuse map came out alright, the normal map looked really messed up when applied to the model in Max. So I turned to the trusty old clonebrush in PS and a plugin from Nvidia that fixed the normal after I had edited it.

(Trying to make as straight edges as possible :I )

(Some areas looked really really baaad)

Some parts needed editing, others didnt

Here the major texturing is done, I was not sure of how the textures, especially the normals would handle the symmetry modifier, but it worked beautifully! There is of course a lot of symmetry along the top and bottom side of the model, but ill try to hide it with some shadows / lighting and good camera angles. In this last image the dirt is far too saturated and visible, but im probably going to remove it and use an AO-shader, or use something in-between.

Next up is the task of building an environment, lighting and rendering!