THE DRIFT

Here is one of the latest projects I have been working on.

For this one I waned to do something really quick and not spend lots of time. So I decided to do just a still frame rather than an animated shot. Plus I used stock 3D assets that I have on my personal library.

So this is how I started the project. One day last summer I was going to meet my friends for dinner and I was crossing a big bridge. I stopped to check the sunset and for some reason I took a picture inside of one of the pillars of the bridge with my cellphone.
I thought it was kinda cool, and when I loaded the pic in photoshop, applied a radial blur effect and looked nice and promising. So I thought it would be even cooler if I could add some kinda racing vehicles, explosions in the background and create a somewhat exciting scene.

But also, I didn't want to take a lot of time working on it so I avoided modeling in maya from scratch and used some assets that I already had.

The foreground ship is done by a swedish modeler Anders Lejczak

He has a huge collection of high quality ships and planes and he shares it for free so that's really cool.

The ship in the BG is one I built for my UFO project at Lost Boys. I modeled that one based on designs founded at http://conceptships.blogspot.ca/

So inside Maya I just did some lighting setup, placed the ships and render couple of layers.
And the final Comp was done in Photoshop.  I had soooo much fun in Photoshop, adding elements like the explosion, the BG city, adding effects like light wrap and glow by hand, just painting with the Photoshop Brush. But the most fun part was adding effects like atmosphere, sparks and bullet traces.

For that I used some images I shot on Halloween of my host family playing with fireworks. Here are some of them:

Some of them are very blurry and not very good, but they worked really well for the final comp.

And here are a breakdown sheet and a quick clip showing most of the layers of the PS file.

I really enjoyed working on just a single frame. Even though there is no animation the picture itself has lots of motion, action and things going on. I'll definitely  do more of this in the future. Just using Maya and Photoshop for the final image and doing a lot of cheats in Comp. Not even worrying if I am rendering linear, 32float, if it's comped in Nuke...  at the end of the day I just want to make cool images, and this type of workflow seems to give nice results without taking much care of all those technical specs.

By the way, TESF is finished, I just need to edit the final output and breakdowns and do the post, but it is coming soon.
Plus, I started working on my next project (this is going to be animated and will contain heavy 3D)
Soon I will post more about that.

Thanks for watching,
I hope you enjoy my work!