This year we celebrate/remember the 450th anniversary of the siege of Szigetvár.

This event was the inspiration of my latest work.

I've been thinking a lot about my new project, Buda repossession was great, on the other hand, i wanted to create something different. So i decided to create Peter Krafft's painting in 3D, BUT to be honest i really disliked the it's composition. Okay probably the siege itself wasn't exactly a teaparty, but still... the composition is totally smashed (for my taste).
So i created my own version :)

Here is the aminated version:

And this is the short 1 minute long "making of -movie"

Now here comes a few details about the project. ( probably there will be a longer version too, but i'll try to keep this short :) )

This is the original painting:

And this was my very first sketch, don't laugh... like i did when, i saw it again after 2 and a half months :D

After the skecth i created a color-chart, but i went to other direction. If you know my artworks, you can tell: i love warm colors. But get back to this image.

Next thing on my todo list: blocking, who and where. Like playing with Lego ( no; not my younger guinea pig, the plastic toy :D ) I could've put a lot more characters in it, but that would be chatoic.

Okay, next task: character detailing, like a nice summer salad, just toss the ingredients and it will be good, no matter what. Hehe, just kidding.

The basic models:

I've created most of the characters with makehuman, creating each and every man would be just a waste of time. but obviusly i had to create their cloths...ugh, big task.
When they were ready ( or at least a few of them) i created the rigs with Genoma ( oh i love it, even it has some strange things :D ) After that... more detailing... hours of searching for referencies. I collected 40-50 reference images and watched Egri csillagok once again ( i've seen it at least 15 times ;) )

All right, whats next?
- basic modells
- clothing
- personalizing the characters
- textures
- more detailing
Oh, i made 45 different textures for the cloths and you can get more combining them together. I created 10 "fold" normal maps (10x4 :) ) But only 12 head textures, with various overlays for the skintones.
A couple of textures ( from 235 ):

A detailing stage:

58 turkish guys and 25 hungarian guys have been made ( obviously there are a few duplicated, but they are in the background :) )
I learned my lesson from the Buda reposseion, i left the idea to move the 80 characters in the scene

Scene, work in progress screenshot:

Oh the background image: i painted this one too. You know i tend to skip the usual stuffs, like the blue-orange colors, but in this case it is just working gooood (and if you have a flaming fort... yeah you get orange colors :) ). 

Aaand we have arrived to the animation part... well... this was a waste of time. Seriously i wanted a sloooooow matrix stlye movement for the scene, but the movei itself is so short, the movement has totally dissapeared. Dang... blanket, flags, arrows and 3 sword wielding guys went to the trash. I mean their animation :)

Anyway, the image was almost ready, so i started to play with the colors. Here is a B&W (sort of) version:

Ha! This is beautiful, but go back to the colors... again. After 96 (!) tests, i found the perfect four:

And this is the final composition. You can't always use the rule of thirds (even when some people can't loose it :) ) But in this scene, it was perfect,  the bridge, the positions, the angles. i tried to push the focus a little bit towards the hungarian side, compensating the turkish force.

These are the rendered footages, there is an orange box at the bottom part, well those are the completely trashed smoke-swirling versions. Yeah i created smoke, but it ruined the contrast, so i had to make a call...and  hit delete :)

For the last part, after a few days of searching for a hungarian music, i asked my cousin to find/create something, so he did :) Soooo after 2 and a half moths, here it is: the final image:

No one got hurt during the creating process ( except me and my shoulder, but that is another story :) )

So the usual thanx:

Firstly to my Wife Roxy, because she tolerates my maniac drawing khmm stages.

To David, because i just can't stop learning from him :)
Comet, for the music.
To Peter, Hungy and Gabcsi, beacause i can "entertain" them with my work in progress images :D
And for the whole bassdrive family for keeping me awake O:)
And finally for my two little guineapiggies: Tofu and Lego ^_^ <3


Now a little resting and painting ;)

Thanx for watching:

ekho

Ps:if you have ideas, suggestions, questions; don't hesitate :)
Ps #2: sorry for the spelling errors i am extremely tired right now :D
Ps #3 a magyar verzió megtalálható a blogomon