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You Can Be Space Bound In One Lunar Day

I have been doing a lot of work lately using [Element 3D] and After Effects to develop digital set extensions like The Dark Market and a Roof Top Set.

Element 3D allows a visual effects artist to rapidly develop scenes and motion graphics. It is a GPU based particle rendering system that was developed by Video Copilot as a plugin. For under $200 dollars you can pull off some rather amazing things. You are limited only by what you can imagine and the amount of ram on your video card.

The Production Process

In this case I already had many of the models that were required to do this scene already in my library. This includes several models from Video Copilot's Motion Design Pack.

These models are highly optimized for Element 3D and are pre-textured. You can add your own textures and even change how those textures are mapped on the model.

The remaining models were prepared in Autodesk 3DS Max. The preparation process involved several steps.

First each model was brought in and I cleaned up some of the things that I did not want on them. These were little greeble parts that were mostly on the decking but also a few items on the buildings. Greebles are little accent pieces that are used to embellish models and give them details. The term greeble was most likely coined by the special effects artists who were working to create Star Wars.

The artists who built the physical models used pieces from model kits. These pieces added a lot of detail and were filmed often using forced perspective to give them a sense of scale.

Once the parts were redacted I assigned some basic textures to various surfaces. These materials were mostly solid colors so I could identify the textures once the models were imported into Element 3D. The remaining step was to set up the texture mapping system known as UVing. The purpose of a UV is to help graphics software wrap 2D textures and materials around a 3D model for rendering.

Into After Effects

From there the models were imported into After Effects and Element 3D. Once in side I assigned the final materials. Some of these were fairly straight forward like the matte grey crane, rails, and antennas. I had originally tried some metal textures but they did not offer the contrast that I wanted so I decided to keep it simple and use the light grey.

On the decks I used a texture that looked like plating that were physically based materials. The meant that the materials tend to act like real materials in physical space do.

I Saw The Light

The next step in the process was to do the lighting design. I used essentially four different lights in the scene. There was one parallel light that helped to produce the main shadows. There was one ambient light to help soften the shadows and give a certain amount of global illumination.

Element 3D has some built in lighting that I used to add a little drama but not strong enough to overtake the rest of the lighting. The remaining light source was a HDR image that I found on the net of the Milky Way Galaxy. This was also the background plate that was used to shoot the construction platform against to give it the feeling that it was hanging in space.

Finishing The Project

To finish things in After Effects I set up a few animated camera passes and wrote the segments out to the disk. I don't really have a great voice for voice over work so I actually used my computer and its text to speech capabilities to record the voice over. It is not the best but I felt for a spoof video it was an okay option. I would like to find some voice talent to over dub the track in the future.

All of this was brought into Adobe Premiere where the video segments, voice over, and music was edited and rendered into a video file. I used a video format that was good for use with YouTube. There are certainly better codecs out there. In the future I will re-render it with a better one.

Please Check Out My Work

If you liked this post please consider upvoting it and following me. You are also invited to check out some of my other work that is posted on here:

@iamwne/on-the-roof-frame-1-virtual-set
@iamwne/blade-runner-inspired-digital-set-the-dark-market-beauty-pass
@iamwne/animated-circuit
@iamwne/a-view-of-the-milky-way

I Love Feed Back

As always I am very interested in your feedback. Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I hope that you found it enjoyable and educational.