Helicopter Attack

Here's another animated short I created in what is hopefully a series of 3D animations to come. This time I chose an action packed 30 seconds animation with three attack helicopters charging on an aircraft carrier. There's plenty of gunfire, explosions... hopefully it's entertaining.

As always instead of investing a lot of time in modeling all elements (helicopters, the ship...) I imported them from www.http://tf3dm.com/ so I can focus on the scene itself. I did modified the helicopters (It is a Mil-Mi 24 with Apache's guns and hellfire missiles), and added a few things to the ship (I modeled, textured and animated guns).

As always, there are some things I did well and some that may look a little off. I'm extremely pleased with the end product. It appears the battle happens at a cold sea and one might not have guessed I recorded this at a bright, sunny day in Santa Monica. I'm also pleased with the dynamics of the video, details (like water splashes), and the sound. One thing that kind of pokes my eyes are the smokes the erupt once the helicopters are hit. This is due to lack of smokes and fires in my library. I created the three smokes in pyrocluster, and while I'm fairly satisfied with the smoke itself I don't think it looks quite realistic in the video. Generally speaking, my library of sounds, smokes, fires and particle explosions is very thin at the moment. Hopefully I'll grow it to make future videos even better.

Here are couple of still pictures so you can compare the effects before and after I modeled and animated this video.

Raw footage before any effects applied 

The animation after all models and effects inserted

Destroyed City - 3D Animation

I wanted to "celebrate" two months of using 3D and special effects program with a good video. I wanted something special, something I can say "Woow I really did this?" Well, that's easier said than done. I encountered numerous problems and was on a verge of giving up this project at one point but I still managed to make an animation very close to what I wanted.

First, I just wanted to create a destroyed, abandoned city. Then I realized it would be boring to look at the destroyed, empty buildings so I added special effects as well as fire and smoke. At the end the city was 64 blocks big, counting more than 9 million polygons. It is made from 4 different blocks; City Hall Area, Downtown,  Residential Neighborhood and Industrial Zone multiplied by 16. Although it's hard to see from the video the city does have street lights and traffic signs. I don't even know how many different buildings I used. Most of the buildings are part of the presets that I modified and in addition I created the entire industrial zone. That took some time as well as applying textures to all of the buildings, roads, etc...

Actually, texturing took entire week and was the most time consuming after rendering. Mostly because I never worked with UV maps before and also because of the number of buildings I used. I set up 9 still cameras and 6 moving cameras to record and render this scene. Out of all 15 cameras I used about 35-40 seconds. The entire render time of moving cameras probably came close to 50-60 hours. I split these in 5-6 days of course. I had 9 still pictures and 60 seconds of footage to choose from (1 still usually ran about 1 sec, some a bit longer.)

Once the projects moved from Cinema 4D to After Effects I wanted to add some effects. So I added screen lines of invading battleships as they prey over the city, searching for another target. The biggest issue in After Effects was motion tracking in 3D. I use AE 5.5 that cannot track on Z axis, just X, and Y. So my fires and smokes were all over the screen until I found a solution and tamed them down.

I must say that music and special effects from movie Battleship inspired and helped a lot. Although movie was nothing spectacular, special effects and music awed me. So I used Steve Jablonsky's - Full Attack to show views from the preying battleship over this city.

The following greatly helped this video:
Steve Jablonsky's - Full Attack (soundtrack from movie Battleship)
www.VideoCopilot.net (sound effects for logo intro, fire and smoke effects)
www.Greyscalegorilla.com (lights)
3D software used: Cinema 4D (The entire animation made in Cinema. No actual footage used.)
Compositing software: After Effects

Aenea

The following is posted in relation to Aenea. Aenea is the last story in a dark fantasy short story series Legend of the Tyrant.

Legend of the Tyrant has finally come to the end. It's been a rather interesting experience writing this ten story series. I encountered many problems and learned how to deal with them. I learned basics of how to move a story forward in a series; how to dump some original thoughts and implement new ideas. More than anything this series helped me write my first relevant female character.

The Legend had started somewhere in March of 2012. I finished the last story in late December of the same year. That's about 9 month span for ten stories. I consider that pretty decent, knowing that in the same period I managed five other short stories and a TV pilot. I publish this story in May of 2013 for technical reasons. Indeed, there was no rush for putting the story earlier. The Legend was my first started and completed series and I'm very happy for that only.

There was time when I got stuck. Sometimes I even asked myself why series of stories? Why not just 2-3 stories. But at the end I was determined to give the mightiest supper villain what he deserved. He deserved ten stories and the conclusion to his legend.

It is interesting to say that I outlined this story immediately after the second story, Rise of the Tyrant, somewhere in April of 2012. The end product never changed, I just tweaked the end a bit. The same end can confuse I might admit. It really doesn't matter how will somebody interpret it but I'll tell you that I envisioned the mightiest supper villain as an unstoppable, unbeatable conqueror. However, as the story progressed, Aella gained more and more importance and my original end, the ultimate victory for the Tyrant, got somewhat changed.  

Synopsis for the last story:

The Tyrant arrives at his mother planet, Aenea, in his final mission for vengeance and unlimited powers. While Aenea’s power doesn’t threaten the Tyrant, another, unexpected power arises to stop him in his tracks.     

I hope that I'll be able to post a nice trailer for this series sometime in the future to replace an old one that I managed with very old software. Until next project, check the blog, read and watch the videos. 

Title: Aenea

Type: Short story

Genre: Dark fantasy/adventure

Word count: 2100

Download and read for free. Follow the link  ----> Aenea