Guest Post from Sam Erb, “Firefox Jet Race”
Hi, this is Sam Erb from Erbbysam Productions. Erbbysam Productions is a very small startup website that I created about 3 years ago because I made a bunch of games in basic and on calculators. Recently I’ve became very interested in video production and CGI. This is the first time that I’ve had a chance to use CGI in something besides a “tech demo.’ If you really must know, yes I am 16 years old and am actively looking for colleges (CSE or film) so I thought that this would be a great chance to do something that would reach a lot of people. I had my father submit the video and everybody who participate in this commercial (including me) and their parents signed release waivers to him.
This was a very big learning experience for me because I’ve really only used Maya 6.5 (a 3d modeling program) before to create very simple animations or explosions. I modeled the planes using curves and then patched together using nurbs. Around the time that I was finished I released that I had no idea how to properly texture the planes so I converted everything to polygons so that I could use the UV polygon texture editor in Maya and clean them up. All of the textures were created and then applied to the various parts of each plane so that each plane was its own individual group.
Every scene had to be set up uniquely to get the lighting right and because they all had to be set up along the z-axis to get the particles to flow correctly. Each frame in Maya took between 1 and 10 minutes to create. Every scene was shot with a green or blue (or pink in a few cases where blue and green were major colors in the scene) background to put in the background later.
The pirate scene was shot on a blue screen that one of my friends, Adam Verreault, has painted on a wall in his basement with him as the actor. The voiceover was done by Sutton Dewey and Mike Hendrix who, in my opinion, have some of the most “commercial” voices in my school.
The background scenes were scripted in Terragen and took over 10 min. a frame so there were many nights of rendering. All of the post production was done using Adobe Premiere.
You can see the video on youtube and see full sized screenshots here on my website.
-Sam
April 24th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
It looks like you tried to save time by rendering the background and the plane seperately and composite them together with aftereffects.
That will make us notice the “alpha black” around 1/2 transparency objects like the fire.
With this being the case, I would suggest you render everything in Maya 6.0, it’ll just look more beautiful… i know it takes an INSANELY long time, but.. if you wanna be a 3D artist, u gotta endure that long annoying wait.