Concept Ships

Simon, my tutor, sent me this blog. Its all about futuristic concept spaceships. Its guna be really good for helping design the heli.

http://conceptships.blogspot.com/

Game of Thrones VFX

While we are on the subject of TV show shot breakdowns I found them for HBOs Game of Thrones. This is another of my favourite shows at the moment and theyve used CG technologies really well. VFX produced by Screen Scene.

Well worth a watch if you hvae the time.

Boardwalk Empire VFX

This is one of my favourite TV shows to come out in a while. Brainstorm digital produced some of the VFX for the show. This is the shot breakdown. It interesting to see how much of the scene is CG.

Artefact 1 - Lighting

This is the first artefact from my research paper. In it I stated that I will produce the artefacts in the following format;

"Lighting – The first artefact will be a series of rendered shots showing how the different styles of lighting affect the same object. These will be with and without global illumination, with and without radiosity, with and without ray tracing."

The first part of this artefact that should be taken into account is the global illumination principle. This is the process of calculating the direction and intensity of the light that bounces of the objects in the scene. It should be noted that both radiosity and ray tracing are used in global illumination but both will be explained in more detail. The goal of global illumination is to recreate the light and feel of an environment as if you were standing in a real world equivalent.

There are 2 types of illumination, direct and indirect. Direct illumination is the light that hits a surface directly from the light source and indirect illumination is the light that bounces off a surface onto another surface. Indirect illumination is what creates the shadows in the scene. Radiosity and ray tracing are algorithms that help calculate indirect illumination. As you can see, from the radiosity and ray tracing examples, when there is no indirect illumination no shadows are calculated. This is because radiosity and ray tracing algorithms calculate the bounce on the light off other surfaces and the strength of the light that is reflected onto other surfaces.

Ray tracing is the more efficient way of calculating the light rays. The ray is traced back from the virtual camera to the objects and environment to the original light source. This saves on memory as you are only seeing the necessary light. It does however have some disadvantages. It doesn’t account for light that has bounced off other surfaces so the shadows appear as black blocks. This is why you have to combine it with radiosity to get a better overall aspect of global illumination.

Radiosity calculates the reflections on surfaces from the light source and from other surfaces. It breaks down the surfaces into smaller elements and then calculates how much light is transferred from one element to another.

Both these techniques can be combines to create a better illumination of the scene. The more reflections and rays that you trace and calculate the more detailed and accurate the scene will become.

Scene Test

This is what i want the scene to roughly look like. Its to just give a basic idea of what the helicopter might look like and what shot might look like. Ill upload one with a different helicopter design soon.

Helicopter MoodVid

This is a mood video of helicopters both CG and Real. It is to give an idea of the types of shot I would like the end piece to look like.

Hand Drawn Helicopter Designs

Concept 2

This one was based around an apache helicopter.

Concept 1 without my crappy photoshop

1st Concept Helicopter

This is the first concept model ive made. I wanted the final design to have a futuristic look and so ive started with a pretty futuristic design with jets instead of propellers. I just put on some basic textures and photoshopped it a bit.

Google Sketch Up

So I have been doing some research on helicopters and concept ideas aswell. I have been struggling to put my ideas down on paper as I must admit that my drawing skills are poor at best...SO I have thought about the skills I have and the programs that are quick and easy to use and have come up with the idea of using Google Sketchup and a means of quickly getting down some ideas. Obviously I am still sketching and writing down ideas on paper but I am trying to get the better ideas into Sketchup.

I have done a model of a chinook helicopter to give an example and to get a bit of practice in before a start on my own models. It took me about an hour and it was the first time ive used sketchup in a while so id hope that I could get it more detail/cut the production time down the more I use it. I then exported the model into 3DS Max to render it.





Im hoping this will give me, Pete and everyone else that looks at my work a better chance of understanding whats going on in my crazy little mind.

I know they are basic but the idea is to aid in chosing the right design rather than creating a model that I will be using in the final piece.

Client Project

Its been a while since my last post and lots has happened regarding my client project since then.

Peter Chiang at, the visual effects company, Double Negative has kindly agreed to be my client/tutor for this project. Double Negative Website

We have been chatting about ideas and decided on a project that showed lots of different skills.

The final idea is to have a futuristic helicopter that is designed, modelled, textured and lit by me. I will film the background plate myself at a local light aircraft airport and composite the helicopter onto the BG plate. It will be a short roughly 30 second clip of the helicopter taking off.

Alot of the details will be refined during the production process.