The Dark is Rising (Sun)...
One of the key challenges for the film is a sequence involving large
numbers of snakes threatening our heroes and in some cases there
could be more than 5,000 snakes in a single shot. In shots where
only a handful of snakes existed, we used traditional animation
techniques through XSI and carried out the lighting through Maya
using 3Delight.
As soon as we had to handle more than a couple of
dozen snakes in a shot, we had to introduce a procedural crowd
solution – for this we used Maya particle effects to both build the
snake poses as well as layout their animation paths. The snake
poses were represented by very lightweight curves, since we were
dealing with so many snakes, it was prohibitive to even use low
resolution snake geometry for animation and rendering purposes. |
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The
Water Sign
The water sign is one of the many signs our hero has to find in
order to defeat the powers of the dark. The
water sign was reflective and refractive in look with very little
diffuse properties. The water sign also had some internal elements
like a soul glow effect which would take place when it came into
physical contact with Will, great care was taken to add caustic
effects in order to enhance the depth of the sign.
The final look of
the water sign was achieved through some manipulation of the
tones and colours in the images being refracted and reflected, as
well as using a high number of ray bounces during the raytracing
calculations in our 3Delight shaders.
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