a personal project I made to improve my 3d & compositing skills

14.06.2019

Originally I wanted to make a character flying through different spaces but quickly realized that the plan was to struggle not with character animation but with other things. Therefore I switched to abstract shapes and made a new animatic in AE.​​​​​​​

The biggest mistake I made was trying to make all shots separately — way better workflow for this type of animation would be to have master comp with full camera & cubes animation which would be copied to all other comps. The first scene would be set up to render frame 0-70, second one 71-140, etc.

Nothing extraordinary just four octane scatters(for different sizes). Then I do my usual thing — scale and position random effector, +size shader effector, size to 0 shader effector. Additionally, I added a few big cubes with JSplacement displacement and a few transparent\light dots panels(generated with the JSp too). Lighting is one HDRI, fog added in post(just like in every other shot).

Pretty much the same technique as shot #1. The only interesting thing is the top light which is pointed to spheres in the back. That adds depth. I have an HDRI in the scene but it has a really small contribution. 

One displacement map from WorldCreator for ground, one for the planet. The ground plane is duplicated, scaled and rotated to add more depth. Lighting is a mix of HDRI and Octane daylight.

Trees and grass are Forester, a few plants from some random models pack. Default forester leaves are replaced with more advanced materials. For trees, I deleted the strip in front of the camera and manually placed instances there. Lighting is HDRI and Octane daylight.

The terrain is generated from C4D noise via texture baking. Center object is a few booles and two cloners. Two side ones are instances of the main one. Lighting is hand made.

Just Forester, scatter and HDRI.

After rotation animation ends dynamics turns on. When cube hits the ground I decrease gravity three times within 10 frames. After the first hit, I keyframed decreasing bounce value on floor plane(from 230% to 80% in 30 frames). To prevent ultra fast spinning I have follow rotation at 3 and angular dampening at 80%. Lighting is HDRI and lights. The emission object has almost no contribution.

Compositing is done in AE. I'm taking beauty pass, subtracting all passes from it and then adding them back with desired exposure\gamma corrections. Color correction is Magic Bullet Looks. 
All fog and atmospheric effects are done within AE with turbulent noise and z-pass. For shots where sky compositing was required, I imported camera and plane from cinema, made sky comp a 3d object, parented to plane and set relative position to 0.

I have almost no experience creating sound design so I just randomly placed VC Motion Pulses, default FL Studio sound and this free Sonniss library together until it started to sound somewhat decent.