“Dragon Hunter” is the working title of an independent fantasy film I’m currently visual effects supervising. Unsurprisingly (for a dragon movie), the film called for a small village to be destroyed. Unfortunately, there is a shocking lack of small, medieval European hamlets in the Utah area that the production could afford to destroy. The decision was made to make one up entirely from scratch.
The first element in the comp is a background that the perspective of the 3D elements will be matched to. I created this quickly in Photoshop by stitching together a bunch of photos to create a destroyed looking field that I liked. This doesn’t have to perfect, there’s a lot that can be done in AfterEffects to fix it up. Also note that I didn’t spend any time fixing the blending problems at the treetops except in the center- the rest will be covered by buildings.
Next is the village itself. The emphasis here is on speed- The textures are largely projected onto very simple surfaces, and the 3D orientation of the scene is just done by eye. There’s no point in worrying about being totally accurate- it just needs to seem right. Anything that’s not seen from the camera doesn’t exist in the model, and I’m also re-using these models in another shot.
I lit this with an HDRI, an ambient light, and a directional light. Normal maps were generated quickly in CrazyBump to add detail. It was rendered at full-res with Final Gather- but only one frame.
An ambient occlusion pass adds contact shadows and a feeling of dirt to the models. Again, I only rendered one frame.
Now to start adding some life to the shot. This flame lighting is a simple group of point lights. Flicker was generated quickly by setting a base intensity level that seemed right for each light, then writing an expression to add a small random value to it on each frame. The scene was re-shaded with a neutral lambert with no specular. The only light source was the flame point lights; falloff was set so that wherever the flames didn’t reach was just straight black. Normal maps were left attached to catch detail. I projected a CrazyBump normal map from the background image onto the ground plane to allow the light to appear to follow the surface of the ground. This is the only 3D element that gets the full 200+ frames rendered, but it only needed to get rendered at half-res. This saved a lot of time.
On to the composite! In AfterEffects I combined all of the above elements, and created an Adjustment Layer that used a Curves and a Hue/Saturation effect to quickly day-for-night the shot. I also did a little quick matting to soften some of the edges where buildings contact the ground.
To save time I let Maya continue to render the flame lighting on one machine while I used a single sample frame to set up how I wanted to use it in the composite. I ended up with a combination of three instances of the same flame lighting render being added in: one for some of the shadows, and masked areas of Lighten and Add transfer modes for the cast light. By the time I finished, the renders were complete- no waiting! Once I had the general village composited and lit in a way that I liked, it was time to add the flames and smoke.
The smoke was a series of stock elements time remapped to my liking and then multiplied over the comp. Nothing fancy here, but it works, and it’s fast. These elements are all standard def, but in the full-res render it’s unlikely anyone will ever notice anything amiss.
Finally, some HD stock footage flames I purchased a while ago. Just mask them out, time remap as necessary, and set them to Add transfer mode. The village is burninated!
I precomped my village layout and added a series of Adjustment Layers over it to add a little more real-world imperfection to the shot. I used AfterEffects’ built-in Wiggler to get some camera shake, then added some vignetting and some blurring on the edges of the frame (as if it were being filmed with a cheap lens). A little lens distortion, some film grain (matched to an earlier night shot for consistency), and a Reduce Interlacing effect to soften it a bit.
A final frame from the work in progress- Click to Play
Total working time from start to finish: about 4 1/2 hours.
Of course, as I mentioned earlier, this shot is still a work in progress. There’s still some key elements missing- like, for example, a dragon (click here to see the final shot with the dragon added). Also, given time I intend to have the upper church facade collapse. I’d like to add some general debris in the central area, and those church windows need to be masked out to allow flames to be seen inside the building. There’s a lot of possibilities still to add, but the shot can hold up to a quick viewing now and can be finished to perfection later.
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Footage used by permission of director Steve Shimek and Dragonhunter LLC
