Ok have a nap, then fire zz missiles!

Ok so the last scene I had to do was the missile fly by scene, which luckly was only one camera shot so I was able to build the entire scene around the Camera shot. This made things much easier from previous shots.
I started by laying out all the plants and there was a bit of jockying with the camera positioning as things got layed out but this is pritty much the final layout breakdown below.

Here is 2 of the plants I started to rig, just using basic fk controls and weighting the geometry accordingly to how I needed the plants to bend.

Once all the plants had been layed out and the necessaryn plants had been rigged up to be animated when the missile flys by, I moved onto animating the missile to then create and attach the jet trail to it. For the missile trail I used the same technique as the trail pete used for one of the other scenes for continuity sake. This was basically one of the visor particle effects, which after a bit of tweeking with the various settings of the particles and the emitter we got it working. Here are the various test shots with the bottom right being the end result for what the missile trail will look right. There are no lights so the focus was on the trail. This was just to speed up the render test as the computer I was using was particulary slow.

The last element I wanted to get roughed out was some lighting so you could see the jungle plants and the missile trail more clearly than the above screenshots. This work was once again recent I just wanted to keep the post clean and keep it all together. I initially used some basic 3 point lighting to get some nice shading, but it seemed to flatten the thickness of the missile trail. Matt then recomended adding in the physical sun and sky as the scene initially seemed a bit dull with only the 3 point lighting. Then this in combination with the physical sun and sky was washing out the scene. So I scrapped the 3 point lights and turned down the gamma on the physical sky. The bottom right as usual is the shot lighting I have so far to better visualise the missile trail and some plant shadows, but it is still a little blown out. If I had more time I would have worked on this further and imrpove the lighting to improve my own basic understanding of lighting.

As this is only the setup stage I will be posting a rendered shot breakdown once emma gets round to the animation. This will be something we work on to have a finished shot between us as it wont be included in the final film now so it will get done when its done for our own protfolio sake.

In the next post Il cover finishing up cleaning up the camp scene adding in simons background matt paintings, sorting the dynamics caches out, making a quick gag for the apprentice in the end scene and crating dynamic fire for the initial camp scene.