For more on RUIN go to www.conceptruin.com

This is the youtube version if you prefer:
http://youtu.be/OhFSXaw5DUo

Just some more render tests while animation is going on.

This is essentially all automatic. Just a few keyframes, with the majority of the animation happening through noise channels on the control rig.

This motion will be baked out to MDDs and used for all the generic riding shots that don’t need specific animation.

This is our first test image of the RUIN short we’re working on. Still a long way to go, but coming along.

Over the past week or two, I’ve been building an asset library for generating our abandoned city ruins. One important part of this library are the low rez 2D ruin assets. It’s very important that we can render these complicated environments quickly. Essentially, this test was using a few hundred ‘billboard’ polys mapped with 2D textures. These will render fast, and keep the scene files pretty lightweight. The question was how well these 2D cards would hold up for environments.

I replicated several different sets of the billboard assets and generated a full 360º ring that all point towards world origin, which is where the action will be taking place. These frames render in about 20 seconds each, and only use about 400 instanced polygons. Considering they will only be used for distant backgrounds, I’m pretty happy with the result so far.

They are all UV mapped to 150 single polygons for use in background shots. Gotta do everything I can to save on render times. The variations and randomizing the scale should make it work really well for distant skylines, and will practically be real-time.

UPDATE: Included a little pan showing all the buildings randomly placed. Render time was about 5 seconds a frame. Very doable.

Recently, our friends at Sunnyboy Entertainment asked us to help them with a few shots for a big sci-fi themed logo animation for a company called Datasat. They are the guys who own DTS sound.

We created 5 shots for the piece, going for a ET/Close Encounters vibe. While I don’t have a link to the full piece yet, here are a few shots. They were created in Modo and comped in After Effects.

Director Chris Milk recently asked us to create several shots for his innovative new music video “3 Dreams of Black”.

It’s a very innovative, cutting-edge film combining live-action, animation, interactive web-gl made in partnership with Google. It’s very cool. If you have Chrome and a decent computer system, check out the project here: http://ro.me

We had about ten days to create two major full cg shots depicting overgrown ruins of modern freeway and city skyline. Fortunately, we have been working on our own internal project called RUIN doing just these kinds of project. So a lot of our assets and processes were able to piggy-back over to the project, and ultimately, turn crank the shots out pretty fast.

We were there on location when the original reference footage was shot. Chris used a 16mm arri on kodak stock to capture the POV of the main character looking out the car. With that footage, we 3D tracked the shot, roto’d out the foreground car elements and re-inserted out cg environments. Then of course, we had to match the very lo-fi 16mm look of the original plates.

Below are a few examples of the originals along with the clean renders as well as a screen grab of Modo showing the heavy use of replicators and modeling involved.

Videos>> Graded and Ungraded

Original Plates>>

High Res Clean Renders

Modo Screengrabs>>

This is the ‘clean’ render. I will be adding dirt and wear and tear next.

BTW, it’s a Modo render.

We will start texturing soon. Can’t wait to see it in action.

BTW, modo was used for modeling.

Say hello to one of the recent additions to the world of RUIN.

This design was very graciously provided by John Park. The guy is ridiculously talented, so check out his other work.

Stay tuned as this character gets converted the 3D. Then stay tuned when we start animating!

So this is actually the start frame for the previous canyon shot I’m working on. It’s all one big minute long shot. This temp is rendering now. Will have to replace all the astroids, but you’re seeing about 2 billion polys in there now.

So after starting this scene today, here’s where I’m leaving it tonight. Added details for the higher section of the planet. Rendering the test sequence now. Here’s a still at 2K! Also including a stereo test for anyone with Magenta/Green glasses. (I prefer that over the red/blue… sorry.)

The opening shot is going to be one of those crazy scale shots. Starting wide of a planet, seeing an astroid field, flying into this astroid field, and finally revealing a particular rock in this sea of debri… this will be Nico’s home world.

So this will probably look a little strange at this stage, but it’s the start of Nico’s launch pad. It’s a very weird, magnetic, rube-goldberg type design. And this strange rock formation is the part of the system.

And if you happen to have Magenta/Green stereo glasses laying around, I’m attaching a nifty stereo render.

>VFX Progression Reel

>Eye of the Storm Behind-the-Scenes

I’m so excited that artist Ian MqCue has given us the design for Nico’s ship. We’re working on modeling now, will post details as we go. In the meantime, check out more of Ian’s freaking awesome style at his blog.

We recently Received our 12 camera motion capture equipment from the folks over at Optitrack. We’re super excited to take the plunge into the mocap realm. Our first test project will be a full cg 3-5 minute scene using assets from one of our internal projects In Search of Humans. Stay posted for info as we take on this little adventure.

Below are some of the shots featured in the article. Stay tuned for when the video is released.