Pytheas Breakdown

After a very long time, I'm back uploading videos! In the time I was gone I have been constantly creating new stuff, and this piece 'Pytheas' is my most ambitious project to date. Over the next few pages I'm going to break down each shot and tell you how I achieved the looks I was going for. But first of all make sure to watch it above!

So let's start off with the first shot we see in the film. If we have a look at it in Cinema 4D we can get an idea of how the scene was modeled. 

Okay, so this is the finished scene un-rendered. As you can see it has been created primarily by modeling one side of the corridor and using the symmetry objects to clone the other side. The image of the nebula at out the back window was pasted onto a large inverted sphere, with a few lights placed outside the ship to get the light from the nebula to bleed into the scene. A volumetric light was placed in each side corridor for the glow effect. The decals were made in Photoshop and simply textured them onto the wall paneling. Now let's take a look at the scene in After Effects.

The top image is a shot straight from render and imported into AE. First of all you will notice colour grading. I added a blueish tint for the classic sci-fi/space feel everyone subliminally recognises. This was done with Colour Balance, B&C, Curves, H&S and Exposure. On top of this I used Magic Bullet Looks to add a slight vignette and a haze. The one star in the background was motion tracked, and I added a flare to the tracked point. I originally planned to track more than one star, in fact I even rendered an early test with about 5 stars tracked, however the scene felt too busy. Seeing as the star you see in the next shot is also a light blue (the same as the star in the image above) it gives the view a better idea of a continuing story, rather than jumping from shot to shot.

Onto the next shot. This image is straight from C4D.

The first thing I want to talk about here is the sun/star. As you can see there's an array of circles. These are actually volumetric omni lights stacked on top of each other. This is an effect I have used before to imitate a star, it gives a great falloff glow and a bright center. Stacking multiple lights allows you to precisely control how bright certain areas of the star are, and also manage the distance of the fall off and its intensity. I'll probably do a tutorial on this as it's something I use all the time. The hologram (sphere) is a simple texture with some horizontal lines and some noise to give it a more electric look. I aligned the spheres to a spline and animated them a long it, with further splines around the spheres aligned to the previous spline. This created a more complex orbiting simulation. I'll talk some more about the modeling of the pedestal in the next shot.

Again, the first shot is straight from render with no CC, and the second shot has some added CC and other effects. The CC is essentially the same as the previous shot. A blue tint has been added along with a haze. After I had the basic CC added I focused more on the sun in the background. Luckily in Cinema 4D I had added a blue volumetric light just out of shot shining onto the pedestal. You'll notice in the first image there is already a slight blue glow. This saved me having to add a fake glow to it afterwards in AE, however it did add to the render time. I added some large square flares for a futuristic feel, and a thin anamorphic style flare to the star itself, as well as a slight shimmer to the outer area with Optical Flares.

The next shot was by far the most complex to pull off. Here is the C4D scene. 

Straight away you can see that there is a lot more going on here compared to the previous shot. Firstly lets talk about modeling. Modeling is definitely my weakest asset when it comes to C4D, I tend to think lighting and in-camera effects and direction are my stronger points. The pedestals were modeled with Loft modeling. Basically I used a circular spline and created a tube like object, with more of the circular splines at various widths, and it some cases in elliptical shapes to create the desired shape. The tops of the tables again were modeled with Loft modeling. I simply cloned the top of the pedestal Loft Splines and scaled them down slightly. Next I used tubes turned on their sides and cloned in a circular fashion to create the paneled floor. You'll be able to see this much clearer in the next shot. I had a vision of using plexus to have some high-tech-Prometheus-look-a-like effects in this scene. To get this effect I used emitters emitting inactive lights which I would later track in After effects. The exterior of the cockpit scene done similarly to the hologram animation in the previous scene. Circular splines with the planets tracked to them were used to position them in a certain manner around the Gas Giant. I used this great little website to generate an Earth-like texture for the planet 'Nix' (the planet the ship is traveling to)

http://donjon.bin.sh/scifi/world/

You can immediately see what is missing in the top shot. The small flares above the pedestals are missing. I actually rendered these separately from C4D and composited them on top of the scene afterwards. The CC follows the same theme as before, not wanting to break the feel between each scene. Unfortunately YouTube butchered the quality of this scene in the upload. The main thing here was tracking all the lights into plexus and creating the desired effects. I believe there were 300+ lights tracked for plexus here, so rendering each of the plexus light systems separately and them compositing them afterwards was the best way to get around the file slowing down massively while working.

Now for the final shot.

This is one of the most simple shots, but one of my favorites. It really reminds me of some of the stuff I did for my previous project ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=accskM36Txg . So the set-up was a large sphere taking the place of a gas giant, with a texture I made which is based on Saturn. The camera very slowly pans backwards, just for a sense of movement, the focus shifts around half way through the shot for when the text added in post fades (It's easier to understand when you watch it!). I added in an infinite light to emulate the light from the star, the actual star light (you can see it just peeking over the top of the Gas Giant) is actually inactive, it's just for visual purposes, where as the infinite light is the exact opposite. A group of inactive lights were also cloned in the background to track flares as stars to in post. I did the same thing with another light which is animated moving very slowly towards the moon. I tracked a flare to this to act as the spaceship as seen from a distance.

I really like the contrast between the before and after shots here. Even though they are both relatively simple looking, the lower contrast and the added stars in the background really sell this scene for me. I used the same CC as the previous scenes, again to keep continuation between the whole short. I added a fare to the close star with a really bright highlight. I was inspired by the posters for the film 'Gravity'; The simple sparse look.

RENDERING

Finally I'd like to talk about rendering. I used the Physical Renderer in built into C4D for every shot, mainly for the depth of field. In the interior shots I added Ambient Occlusion with about a 10% contrast. I rendered them all as PNG sequence with 16bit depth and alpha channeling. I also created a composting file to import all my lights and other scene settings into After Effects.

Well that about summaries the whole thing, as always if you have questions about more specific things feel free to e-mail me a question or post one on the video or on the blog here!