Boxes with Egg

I then began trying out boxes with the egg, at this stage I was still using textures that I had not created myself.


Before using the rust sea idea I was still hankering after the use of a water material on the sea.



And I didn't like the alignment of these boxes.








Here I was beginning to see what Leonie meant about the mist/sea going right up to the egg with no change in the texture, that was something I would have to attend to out of Bryce and into C4D.


So this was about the time I moved over to Cinema to work.

Textures on the Star Egg

At this point (January 2010) I was testing the amount of light in the scene, and textures on both eggs and buildings. I didn't do much to the main egg (Closest to camera) but worked on the other two - which were at that stage the only two Elitist eggs.














Later in January I then began addressing the issue of the texture for the main egg and here in testing mode in Bryce I was able to create a sky to match the mood.













I also managed to get a really nice glow to the egg and the use of metaballs also was an intriguing route to go down especially with the ability to make the metaballs cling to the surface of any object.










However I knew I would not be rendering or animating from Bryce and as I knew a lot less about how metaballs work in Cinema4D or in Maya, and although nice I could not sufficiently relate these metaballs to my overall ideas about the egg film which involved rust and decay and our lack of appreciation of its beauty and the need for an individual to interact through a deliberate choice with such things, rather than by falling into the morass by mistake and expecting to survive it.


So I tried out some other ideas for things to attack the eggs:

I was still clinging to the metaballs idea at this stage but adding other things, like the boxes, and I dallied for a while with the idea of bugs.

However this was not my model and I did not see that I could take sufficient time out to model a bug myself and I wanted all the models to be mine. (thinking of possible copyright issues)







There followed a bit of experimentation with the arrangement of boxes on the egg.





And at this stage I was also trying different things with the rust mists or rust sea.

At this stage I was going towards the rust mists idea but although having gaps in the planes with the rust textures on them and using multiple numbers of mist planes, animating them I could not get a satisfactory movement going.

So although in a still image this sort of thing looks really great I found that the gaps weren't working.

So I began looking more towards the rust sea idea, but I was still liking the multiple rusts.

Egg Lights in a Tree

It was also at about this time that I had the idea for the egg light tree - as you can see from an earlier post back in October below.

It seems odd that this idea should have survived the process where so many others didn't.


However the shape of the tree has changed. The tree on the left here is a Bryce tree turned upside down with its roots uppermost, the new version is a little different:








And although the texture looks much the same, the shape is quite different, it... er, relates to the 'life' theme much more closely now.

Koff.

First egg test - here the idea of a single chip of eggshell that had become almost completely detached, but was still sitting there - like a single curl on a cartoon boy's head - which I later animated to bounce up and down in time to the egg's movements.

I liked the brown, it looked very egglike, but I also liked the idea of a simple outline to the egg and the chip didn't fit with this, so it went, I also went away from the idea of a brown eggshell at about this point too. I wanted to keep with the idea of simplicity, and white fitted with that, so the egg changed to a white one at this point.


Here the design of both the world and the buildings begins:

Initially they were simple tall straight shapes, in varying sizes.






Then I felt that the simple whiteness of both buildings and of egg and the world's whiteness was just too much,






so I began experimenting with colours for the egg, here some touches of pale blue colour have been put in the egg and the whiteness of the world is toned down to a more grey look.



I also did some experimenting with the infinite plane, here it's a fairly simple grey with just a touch of reflection and a little bit of texture, but still mostly plain.

Then I thought why not use water?

I liked this quite a bit, it broke up the reflections of the buildings and blended the haze better.

But the lack of a ground surface did kind of limit the logic of where the eggs could go, so that I had to add barely submerged areas of buildings for the further egg to stand on, and movement became a matter of hoping from building to building.

That I didn't like so much. So despite the possibilities of some quite nice camera angles, I abandoned this idea fairly early on.

Early Egg Film Developments

Early designs for the egg film, no set name for the film either yet, are:











This shot: I wanted to keep the sky as simple as possible so here I'm going for greys with just a touch of colour in the blue haze on the horizon - this shot is an experimental one where I was working in Bryce6.3 - you can also see the initial simply designed buildings plus two more complex buildings. I really like the complex ones but they don't go with the simple ones - I'm thinking of using the complex ones for the more exciting part where the eggs go to investigate the lure.



















This shot above is now using the complex buildings down below the simple buildings - which are raised up on a hill, to separate them from the grime, dirt and alure down below. This shot is also experimenting with lights and shadows, Film Noir type, but with colour.

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!

I just love this pear light tree idea, by Nick Foley: Nick's Tree it fits pretty well with an idea I am contemplating animating for my 3rd year film.
The pear part but not the lights.

I love the thought that you can take a pear off Nick Foley's Pear Light Tree and it stays alight for about a hour, you can then put in back in its place on the tree and it recharges and lights again.
and it's such an elegant piece.