An Ident we’ve created for composer and sound designer Iz Svemira.
Direction/Animation – Sava Zivkovic
Music/Sound Design – Iz Svemira
Spacecraft Design – Milan Nikolic
Tools: 3ds Max, Octane Render, FumeFx, Quixel Suite, Adobe Suite
CONCEPT
The concept for this piece evolved with our desire to learn new techniques. I’ve always wanted to try out digital matte painting but never found the time. Enter Learn Squared and Maxx Burman’s Intro to Matte Painting course. Upon deciding to enroll, I knew I wanted to take the course a bit further and make it into some sort of animation, rather than ending up with a series of images. As it happens, our good friend Iz Svemira needed an Ident, which immediately informed our concept.
Iz Svemira translates to “From Space” which goes hand in hand with our love for science fiction, and gives us an opportunity of yet another dive into this world, while providing the chance of learning something new and expanding our skillset.
Taking the idea further, I teamed up again with my good friend Milan Nikolic who has taken Alex Figini’s Concepting in Zbrush course and translated it into creating the concept design for our spacecraft.
SPACECRAFT DESIGN
Milan has been evolving as a concept artist, pushing his skills further and constantly learning new tools to help with his daily design work. This time rather than using Zbrush for the 3d base, he designed the spacecraft in 3D-Coat, applying the design knowledge from Alex Figini’s class.
The result is an incredibly fast and iterative process for creating base hard surface shapes in 3D-Coat, and further detailing and over painting in Photoshop.
ASSET CREATION
This project, as every other personal piece, had to be completed in a very strict timeframe, resulting in severe simplification of the spacecraft. The finished model doesn’t do justice to Milan’s original concept, but the timeframe just didn’t allow for it, and the primary focus for me on this project was the environment matte painting.
Having said that, the asset creation was still a lot of fun. Again, Milan provided his rough 3d base, which was used for re-topo in 3ds Max. The texturing was again done with Quixel Suite, with the addition of a lot of small details being added in NDO. This proved to be an extremely fast way of adding small visual interest to your model without actually modeling them.
MATTE PAINTING
Following Maxx’s guidance, each painting was created at 4k resolution, and then expanded further for the requirements of each shot. The paintings were then broken up in various layers which were projected on simple geometry in 3ds Max, giving us the correct parallax effect for each shot.
The images I used for compositing are free collections form Jacek Pilarski and Noah Bradley, combined with Monolith renders from 3ds Max which were over painted and composited with the rest of imagery in Photoshop.
SOUND DESIGN
Iz decided to pull back on the score and let the sound design alone guide you through the world, ramping it up towards the ending logo reveal. The focus on this project was experimenting with different sound synthesizing techniques for producing convincing sounds, as well as studying the impact of the sound on editing.
He produced the sound and music and did the final mixing in his new studio space, baptizing it for future professional engagement.
FINAL STILLS
