Creating a sustainable society on mars
The Brief
For this project my team decided that we would use the VFX brief as we thought that it would be much more feasible to get a finished product out in time within the give time frame.
Monday
Monday was the beginning of this project for the team. The first thing we settled on was doing the VFX brief then we started to brainstorm ideas for the task. We quickly decided that doing a concept type video about the colonization of Mars would be something that we could achieve and make look good.
The first thing i started with in my tasks was building out a Martian environment that we could place assets in and make a good looking colony. To get the base landscape i used blender landscape generator to make a base environment, i played around with the settings to get that rocky and displaced floor that mars has. The next thing i did to make the environment more detailed was procedurally make 3 sets of rocks consisting of small, medium and large. I then used blenders new geometry node system to scatter the collections of rocks and using weigh paint to define where i wanted certain rocks to be scattered. I also used mountain assets from megascans to build out the mountains.
Now i had the environment built out i took a 3D model that was provided in the resources part of the brief and took it into mixamo which is a library of motion capture animation. I applied a walking animation to it as it wouldn't be feasible to animate it myself. I imported it into my scene and set it up so that it looked like it was walking on the surface. I then parented an empty to the leg and then parented a camera to follow the empty then i added some depth of field and rendered it.
Tuesday
Tuesday i started by working on a shot of mars. I took a 3D model and animated it spinning then rendered it out as a png sequence. I took that into nuke and added 3 levels of blur and glow to get that cinematic atmosphere look. Then for the background i used a noise map and brought down the whites the added a glow on them so that they would act as the stars.
The next thing that i did on Tuesday was take the same animation of the astronaut and move it so that it would approach the edge of the mountain. To get the camera move i made a curve that went the way i wanted and the added a follow path constraint to a camera and had the camera track a empty that was near the astronaut this is how i achieved the tilt at up at the end.
Wednesday
Wednesday was spent rendering the shots that i made on Monday and Tuesday, So there wasn't much i could get done whilst it rendered.
Thursday
On Thursday i worked on the shots where you see the building being built up and rising. To achieve this effect i animated a Boolean that was cutting up the structures and as the Boolean rose it would reveal the structures. This method was very rough and if i had more time i would have liked to refine it. The next shot after those two was a shot of a living room interior that my team mate Joseph made and that i textured within blender and use the same path technique i used earlier in the week. Thursday night was spent rendering out these shot .
Friday
My time on Friday was dedicate to turning all the shot that had been rendered out into a final edit that would be presentable.
One issue that occurred was the fact that there was a hard cut during a moving shot and it made the edit feel disjointed so Sam helped me put in a cross fade so that the transition would feel more natural.
Final touchs were added like music, a title screen and a end credits screen.
Conclusion
In Conclusion i was very pleased with how the project turned out when it was finished, However i do wish there was a little more time as i could have produced much more polished shot. Render times where a huge issue and it was a limiting factor so if i do something like this again i would be constantly managing renders so that i didn't waste time.