Saturday 1 May 2010

Textures In Egg Film


Working on my Egg film:

This aerial shot is just testing textures on the eggs, and just at this moment on the nearest egg, the one turning to stone through cracked egg shell.

This has been a very interesting film to do from many points of view including textural. I have used mostly photo textures of rusts and varying stages of crushed eggshell.

I have used UV Mapping and BodyPaint to improve the look of these textures on the models.

In some cases I've used displacement but in some I found that the textures not using displacement looked better. In particular on the buildings just visible under the crushed piles of eggshell - there I found that the texture without displacement looked more delicate and I just loved the way the light caught at it here and there as the camera moved, giving a delicate sprinkling of specular light along the edges of the cracked shell texture.

I have however used displacement quite often as I found that it could usually remove the patterned look - especially if you use a procedural process to drive the displacement, or using layers in the displacement channel and thus being able to use both a procedural noise and an image to drive the displacement.

This way you can get a much better result, less patterning, and a more interesting texture but as the layers are inside the displacement you're only using displacement once. Without using layers in this way you'd need to have 2 lots of displacement on the 1 texture and too much displacement in a scene and the PC just refuses to render at all.

This image shows the patterning on the crushed egg hillocks.














The next image shows this patterning markedly reduced.






It also shows some improvements on the Eggs' textures.
Plus the addition of some egg drips where broken eggs have spilled their contents over the buildings below.








Earlier building designs were much more complex than these simple shapes with their almost pristine whiteness, and although intriguing and interesting and creating interesting possibilities with lights, shadows, colours and shapes - indeed in some cases - as here: various distortions of shape were experimented with - however in the end the simple shapes and soft white colouring seemed to suit this particular film better.

I very much like the look of Film Noir and the above image with its shadows and lighting makes me think of such films, so that an little trip into a Film Noir kind of experiment would be a lovely way to go for the future, especially if I can do such a film but with using colour as well as the feel of Film Noir with its darkness, its bars of shadow, and often its use of mist and fog. Lovely!

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