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!

Finished modeling, enter Mudbox

The main parts of the model is now complete, the only thing that have been missing was the cannons. There are no good references of the guns on the thing, so I had to use some imagination, they are in the same style as the rest of the ship, a kind of semi-organic design. In one of the shots there is a person standing next to it and it looks really huge, but its still a bit of a guess.

There are some areas around the cockpit still that could need some extra details and geometry, but Id rather cheat a little and add those later. It will just be tiny details that ill just put a regular uvw map on and add a rough bump mapped texture to.

I have started texturing too, using Mudbox. After some experiments it seems that trying to paint textures larger than 2048x makes it crash because my graphics card runs out of memory. I currently have 1GB video memory, so there are hardware limits as to how realistic i can make the model. But I think its coming along very well.

I use a slightly blue grey as a base, then some organic patterns for the light areas and then a brown texture for the edges to simulate dirt. But I might rather try to adding dirt with a shader in max.

First entry.

This blog is for documenting my progress of re-creating the alien attack ship from Roland Emmerich's 1996 movie Independence Day.

The film is a bit disputed between critics, with an average score of 6.6/10 of IMDB, but since it is a disaster movie you have to see it with the right eyes. What Jeremy Clarkson said about the Hummer H2 once on Top Gear pretty much sums up this film, he said something like "It is like a roman orgy, a Viennese waltz and a missile attack on Las Vegas".

So, anyway:

The whole craft has a very organic feel to it, with lots of curves and vein-like lines, grooves and bone-like support struts. The designers and modelers were probably inspired by Geiger, but the design is very unique, it looks far more crude around the edges, more insectoid and the texture is rough and metallic.

It is a challenging task for a beginner like me to create a photo-realistic model of a complex thing like this, but the aesthetics of this spacecraft really appeals to me. It is the blend of organic form, metals, pipes, bones, fang-like insectoid front parts, the alien skull shaped "head" and overall crude, scary and definitely other-worldly look. It is the sum of all these elements that makes it look frightening and awesome. This is not the shiney, glowy, clean and happy type of alien spacecraft from E.T or Close Encounters, but more like a mutated alien version of the Millennium Falcon, crude, old and dusty, but still looks very brutal.

On the visual effects course I were warned not to use spaceships in my vfx shots, but this craft is an iconic piece of 90's cinema, and disaster movies in general. I might not end up using it in a shot, but I will at least render a few stills of it to put in my reel.

I have just started to work on the engines, but since it is impossible to get hold of any precise references, I have had to fill in the gaps with my own imagination. There is one shot of the rear of the craft in the movie, it is the scene right after the hillbilly sacrifices himself, where a few fighters return to dock in the main motherhip.

A lot of the details on the model will look a lot better with texture, since the surface on the whole craft looks like it is covered in small nubs, like crude sand paper. This will be added with normal and displacement mapping in Mudbox. The ribs were hard to line up properly, and there is some empty space in the slot in the main hull, but I will put some bits and bobs in there to fill it up.

This is the reference set-up in 3DS Max, with front, left and top views. The top reference is supposedly from a sketch of the original plastic cast model, and is not a photoshopped reference from the movie.