Monday, January 29, 2007

MOONLIGHTING



Teething. What a joy. A week's worth of restless nights so far for my son. I think he's pretty much through the worst of it this time round. I can't wait for them all to come through.

As a result, I decided to combine dad duty with a little late night work on the Grimmwood teaser that's coming soon (above you'll see a bit of design work for it). It's actually a sponge scanned in at high rez and then put through various filters in photoshop, grey scaled, and then wrapped around a sphere in Swift 3D, exported as a shockwave flash and imported directly into Flash, set against a star map background I made earlier, with added blue glow in Flash and a shadow to form the crescent. In Grimmwood the moon is going to be enormous, so this is one of several tests for it. I am getting happily addicted to making planets and moons now.

4 comments:

Andrew Glazebrook said...

That's no moon...it's a Space Station !! I like this moon,it's very nice,and I like the glow !!

I. N. J. Culbard said...

High praise indeed. Thanks. Having a blast with creating textures at the moment.

Jo Bling said...

Ian, some smashing stuff youve been creating here mister. Careful or you'll become one of them there CGIheads like Mr Glazebrook ;-)

I. N. J. Culbard said...

Hey, Bling, thanks. At the moment I'm trying to get a graphic look out of everything, rather than photo-real. Bit of a tricky balance which means I'm doing the most tests I've ever done on a project. I'm looking to 101 Dalmations, Rescuers Downunder, Basil the Great Mouse detective, films like that, for their earlier use of 3D or CG as was later the case and how this often complemented the 2D animation for its simplicity (a great example would be the Giant in Iron Giant and how that blends in to the 2D world... that's actually quite close to the intention of the car chases in Dalmations in terms of aesthetics). Dalmations is a greatly resourceful film visually. It was the first to use Xerography (which Disney himself didn't like), due to budgetary cuts which greatly influenced the look of the film and films that followed. I think, if memory serves correctly, that what they did for the cars was build models of the cars, of that I'm certain, with edges highlighted in black, then that work its way into the Xerography process. Oddly, it was because of the brother's Grimm that this was a process they had to adopt because it was due to Sleeping Beauty's commercial failure that the studio had to resort to this technique.