For The King

Hello!

We’re finally finished with our animated short film called For The King. It’s about a King and his faithful servant.

Here it is:

And here’s a breakdown:

Jørn

Here’s a clip from our short:

Jørn

Here’s some stills from the short:

Jørn

Finally managed to put together a turntable of the final king-model.
Since Maya’s hair shot the rendering time through the roof, we ended up using poly hair on both of the characters.

Amund

For the last couple of days I’ve been playing around with Maya’s fluid-effects to create some smoke and dust. I used particles to emit the fluids, which is a new feature in Maya 2011 that allow for much better control.

Here is a short clip showing the setup::

Amund

This is a quick render of the tower in our short. I really get a bowser’s castle kind of feeling about this tower, it’s probably the spiky iron rings that does it.

Tarje

I put together a mini-breakdown of shot 04 from the short, showing the assembly-process of the scene. This is not the final render, it just the beautypass.

Håvard

I did some rendertest to get a feel for how it’s all gonna look towards the end. It’s pretty simple “comping”, beauty, occlusion and a zDepth pass. All done in after effects CS5!

Tarje

I’m more or less finished the trees. They will for the most part be put on planes as a texture since the polycount is pretty big. I’ve put the leaves on the tree with the Maya’s PaintScriptsTool, maybe not the perfect solution, but the only one that gave me some sort of control over the leaves.

Tarje

We have a scene in our short where about a thousand arrows will be shot through the air. Hand-animation is out of the question, so we’ve discussed different way’s of approaching this, for example particles.
Problem with particles is that they don’t have rotations, another problem is that we want do define where the arrows should land, and the last thing is that we want automatic wiggle as they land.

So, I used a couple of hours to make a MEL-script that creates a reference of an arrow for each selected curve, adds it to a motionpath (with random “pre-defined” start/end), and adds different wiggle’s on each arrow when it hits the ground.

In this example there’s only 190 arrows, but with a proxy-reference there’s no problem even with thousands of arrows within a matter of minutes.

I’ve also made a script for automatic placement and animation of the arrows coming out of windows e.g. The script creates an arrow on each selected vertex, and the direction of the arrows are based on a negative aim towards a locator, so the spread/aim on all of the arrows can easily be controlled with one locator.

Jørn