Improved Fire and Smoke, Part 3

I replaced the old CG fire and CG smoke with composited fire and smoke. Here are before-and-after comparisons of Scene H328, which is after the Stormtroopers have massacred the Carinda family (represented by the CG Stormtrooper stand-ins lying on the ground on the bottom-left):


And here's a close-up comparison (Scene H329):


You can't really tell in these pictures, but I also added a flickering light to the doors and windows that are "on fire." This helps blend the 2 different layers and makes them look like the flames from the composited fire are illuminating the CG model.

Later,
Bob

Jedi Starfighter Cockpit, Improved Fire and Smoke, Part 2

Brad's hard at work designing and building the Jedi Starfighter cockpit set. It will be our first (and perhaps only) real set in the entire movie -- everything else is a digital/CG set. I can't wait to see it, and I'm especially excited to see our final footage on this set. It will DEFINITELY elevate the realism of our movie.

On the CG side, I stumbled across some stock footage of real fire. Brad did a great job creating CG fire and CG smoke, but our goal is to create the best looking movie possible. So... I composited the fire elements onto a background plate of the Carinda homestead to see how it would look. Here's a side-by-side comparison:

The picture on the left shows Brad's CG fire and CG smoke.
The picture on the right shows composited fire and smoke.

It's a tough decision because I know Brad spent a ton of time figuring out CG fire and smoke. But, as mentioned earlier, our goal is to create the best looking movie possible, even if that means tossing hours and hours of hard work. I know the feeling -- we've discarded hundreds of hours of my work in favor of better-looking images. It's tough to see that much hard work go to waste, but ultimately it's worth it when our movie looks one step closer to a real "Star Wars" movie.

Later,
Bob

Improved Fire and Jedi Temple improvements

Here's Brad's latest fire test at the Carinda homestead:

Pretty cool, huh? As soon as he adds the fire to a few more places, we'll render new background animations, composite them with our live footage, and have some close-to-final shots at the Carinda homestead!

I spent last week improving the geometry and texture mapping on the Jedi Temple exterior. Here's a sample before-and-after comparison:

I replaced that fake, CG-looking doorway with a "real" Jedi interior. Not only does it look much better, but it's also simpler because it's just a screenshot that I took from "Revenge of the Sith." Funny how a 2D picture looks more 3D than our previous 3D doorway...

I also changed the scale on the exterior floor tiles because they looked too small to me.

Anyway, as I was searching for "Star Wars" reference pictures online, I stumbled across an amazing picture of the Jedi Temple's Processional Way entrance:

Sweet, huh? This is EXACTLY the kind of matte painting we needed for the scenes of Brad infiltrating the Jedi Temple. If we use this new matte painting, Brad sneaking into the Jedi Temple would change from:
to !
Hard to believe those are the same scene, right? (BTW, the 2nd picture is a quick-and-dirty composite that I threw together just to get an idea of how the new scene would look. There's no color correction, lighting consistency, digital shadows, etc.)

Unfortunately, we only have that 1 matte painting of the Processional Way, which means we can't change camera angles. We're going to try reducing Brad's "Jedi Temple infiltration" scene down to 3 shots and cheat the backgrounds, because we really want to use this new matte painting for the Jedi Temple background. But if it doesn't work, we'll go back to our 3D model and I'll resume improving the texture mapping and geometry.

We're shooting live footage tomorrow, so we'll see how many scenes we can fit in. After our last few sessions of shooting live footage, we learned to strive for quality rather than quantity. The reason is because we banged through a bunch of shots, but couldn't use any of them because of poor acting (not Brad's fault since he isn't an actor -- we just should have done more takes), poor lighting, framing problems, etc.

Anyway, we should have some cool pictures next time with our new live footage.

Later,
Bob

Alderaan Royal Palace and Carinda Homestead

I finished re-texture-mapping the Alderaan Royal Palace hallway to match the room that I did a few weeks ago. Here are before-and-after pictures of the hallway:

Looks much more realistic, right? Just so you don't have to scroll down and find a picture of the Alderaan Royal Palace room, here it is so that you can see how they match-up for consistency:


After I finished the Alderaan Royal Palace, I moved onto the Carinda Homestead. Here are a few before-and-after pictures:

In addition to improving the texture maps, I deleted the speederbike (mostly to decrease the size of our digital model, which was getting unmanageably huge). I also made the lighting less pink. Here's a reference shot from "Attack of the Clones" that I used, mostly to see how the ground looks:


Here's another before-and-after comparison of the Carinda Homestead:

I got rid of those fake-looking round things and replaced them with a more realistic-looking exhaust vent.
I also changed the texture mapping to more accurately match this reference photo from "Attack of the Clones:"

I never realized how rough the stucco is on exterior walls, but after seeing this reference photo, I changed our texture maps.

Finally, here's the last before-and-after comparison of the re-texture-mapped Carinda Homestead:

I'm done with the Carinda homestead... for now. I'll probably refine them in the future, but they're good enough for now. In the meantime, I'm going to keep improving the texture-maps on our other digital models. I'm not sure which one I'm going to work on next, so I guess we'll all just have to wait and see...

Later,
Bob