KELSO LOCOMOTIVE ANIMATION

Technical details:

software:

Autdoesk Maya
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe After Effects
Shake

hardware:

Rendered on 5000+ HP blades in the DreamWorks Animation data center on weekends with permission.

3d notes:

Locomotive and coal cars I modeled in Maya nurbs. Texturing made from custom shading networks within Maya.

Desert floor is a polygonal mesh with USGS Landsat elevation data applied from the Kelso Valley.

I set up the base animation of the camera move with aim constrains. The camera always aimed at the locomotive as I manually placed of the camera in the scene based on the timing to the music that I wanted. Next I baked the animation curves to be able to fine tune them extensively.

Bushes are rendered via a custom MEL script I wrote, vSprites. I estimate there are around 60,000 bushes in this animation. The scene is manageable since vSprites generates and culls bushes on the fly during render time. Each vSprite is a single polygonal plane facing the camera with a small file based texture from an on-demand and once-rendered Maya scene with 1 Maya Paint Effects-based bush object (though the object scenes could be any geometry). ( What a mouthful - still, easier to say than to make :-). Bushes within a certain range of the camera are re-rendered each frame to maintain realistic 3d perspective.

7 render passes: Locomotive, Coal cars, Locomotive shadow, Coal car shadow, Steam, Heat Diffusion, Desert Floor.

Rendered in Maya. Comped in Shake and After Effects.