ALIEN INVASION

ALIEN INVASION

Project done for the end of the Master in 3D at TRAZOS School, Madrid.

The work was distributed with a meticulous and refined pre-production, due to the short time margin and the large size of the project.

In principle, my idea consisted of an alien invasion. I wanted it to be a desolate atmosphere, with humanity extinct, and with a lot of nature.

I was looking for a reference image for my city and found one, in Adobe Stock, with identity number #642896516.

i thought this one could generate the style i was looking for my project. i didn't want it to be an identical project, just similarities.

UNDERSTANDING THE PROJECT BEFORE MODELING

To do this, I started with blocking.

I thought of modeling 7 buildings, of different height and length, with a road in the middle that would separate the distribution of the buildings into three on the left and four on the right.

I had to keep in mind that I wanted a scene with great depth, and with a vanishing point in the center of the camera. I also knew that I had to destroy seven buildings (or at least, the ones closest to the camera), texture them, render them and composite them.

I also wanted to create a spaceship and a destroyed car, all with their respective fires, and plants, many plants to generate the sensation of an abandoned city, worn out by the passage of time.

Measurements were very important, so with the basic maya human, from the content browser, I started to measure the doors of the buildings, the size of the buildings, the sidewalks of the street, the car, the spaceship, everything...

MODELING BEGINS

At the beginning, in the modeling, everything was amazing, simple and solving the problems efficiently.

I did not have too many problems with the modeling, since they were not very complicated objects, only the Bmw car and the spaceship, maybe it was the most tedious, but really affordable, since the car in spite of trying to make it the best possible, in no moment it would be animated and neither I thought to put it near the camera, I thought to have it in the background.

Something that I had in mind, before I started modeling, was that the buildings, all of them, were going to be different, and some of them I could work a pattern from the second floor, and extend that pattern to the top, and since I was thinking about that, I also thought about making the uvs, from those patterns. The good thing? it would go much faster, the bad thing? I couldn't do it with all the buildings.

When modeling, I also had to keep in mind that I had to separate by objects, I mean. The windows, I would make them as a separate object of the building, or the doors, the glass of them.

It was very important to work these things separately, so I started to work all the topology of my objects, and taking into account to optimize the project, because it was going to be very big (FOR MY COMPUTER). 

DESTROYING IN ZBRUSH

It was in the sculpting and cracking work where I had to pull my hair out, because some displacement map did not do what I wanted in ZBRUSH, but after repeating a couple of times to a couple of buildings the sculpting, cracks and breaks, everything came out lower than expected.

I looked to destroy as close to the camera as possible, to optimize.

Road, sidewalks, and the four buildings closest to the camera.

Besides, I made a decimado, to texturize the cracks, and maybe to use them in case of having problems when connecting the displacement maps, because after all, they would not be animated or destroyed, so I thought it could be a good second option.

So, at the end of the day, I had displacement maps, the deformed objects in zbrush exported in subdivision 1 and on the other hand the decimated ones.

Before getting into the subtance painter, I went to the Quixel or Megascan page, and downloaded all the assets I could related to worn out city objects, construction sites, and I googled a lot of graffiti and textures.

I placed them in the MAYA scene. I also searched for HDRI's to start seeing the light when everything was textured and united in the MAYA scene.

EXPLORING CHAT GPT AND GOOGLE MAPS

It was very important to generate a lot of visual rhythm, and I thought about the colors that each building should have, to achieve greater visual strength, something powerful that keeps you looking.

At the same time I needed to know what material the buildings would be made of, so the best way to understand a city, its buildings and materials, was to go into CHAT GPT, and ask the material composition of the buildings of a city.

Following these concepts, ask when these materials deteriorate, how they usually transform.

With these references I managed to improve my idea.

Then I entered google maps, and went around a lot of cities, New York, Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, until I found Sydney. With Sydney I discovered what style I liked the most, and with a little mix with New York and Brooklyn, I thought it could be a great city.

TEXTURING IN SUBSTANCE PAINTER

As I said before, the importance of the visual rhythm, the balance, not only of the composition, which I had already thought about in the layout, but also of the color, that offers the viewer perspective and depth, that can move the eyes and that every detail calls the attention, I believe that the power of color is that, and I wanted to achieve it.

Together with the visual weight of the scene, it could look very good, but, depending on what material I chose for the buildings, for example, metals, I would have higher brightness and even could not find the desired colors, and then, when joining the textures in my scene, the illumination would be less manageable.

Concrete, brick, and aluminum would be my three main materials.

In the final scene, each building would be wrapped in vegetation, implying that some time had passed since the city was abandoned.

If time passes, the materials deteriorate with the same intensity, so I tried to dirty my buildings with rust, humidities, scratches, scratches, polish, etc.

For the asphalt and sidewalk, drawn traffic signs, dust, dirt, moss.

Once the work was finished, I got carried away and thought about changing the textures of the downloaded assets, to integrate them even more with the city scene, so yes, I started to texture each prop that I downloaded and gave a much more own touch for my scene.

With the alien ship I wanted to give it an old, but modern touch, and I thought in the typical star wars ships, with so many squares and gates.

With the Jsplacement program, I recreated the style and downloaded both the basecolor and the displacement of that texture. Well, that was crazy!

TIME TO BRING TEXTURES INTO MAYA AND ILLUMINATE

With everything together in MAYA, it was time to illuminate. I distributed all the lights with one thing clear, there were not only 7 buildings ....

I had to create lighting that would recreate the reflection of glass buildings that were outside the camera plane. To do this, I placed spot lights behind each building in the direction of the road. I also decorated the ship with lots of lights and some volumetric lights.

I wanted it to be at night, but I used an HDRI of a blue sunset, to have more illumination and more detail of my textures. Then, with NukeX, in compositing, I would use projections and I would use some HDRI of a night sky.

CRAZY IDEA WITH MIXAMO

But, at this point... with two months to go, I think my scene is too empty and it's not going to work.... So I thought, we need explosions, laser shots, smoke, people running!!!! HAHAHA, and nothing, I went for it.

For the running people, I took the gentleman from MAYA's content browser, textured him fast three different times, to make them look like different people and with the MIXAMO web, and with MAYA's trax editor, combine animations and off we went!

EMBER GEN

For the smokes, fires and explosions, I used ember gen and the objects I wanted, so that they collided, together with the nuke camera, which I now explain.

CAMERA TRACKER IN NUKE

I went to the Plaza de España, in Madrid, and I recorded myself walking and raising the mobile phone to see the roof of the RIU Hotel.

I arrived home, and exported the camera, with a camera tracker in Nuke, as allembic for all programs.

RENDERING IN ARNOLD

It was rendered without layers, with a sample in the lights of 3 and with very low atmospheric, the parameters for the render were

7/5/3/3/0/0

and the volumetrics I had to lower the intensity for the white noise, but everything came out very well, the small details could be fixed, in Nuke, because they were tiny.

NUKEX

This section was very complicated and disciplined as I ended up making a huge tree of nodes.

At this point, the first thing was to look for a HDRI, that was at night, and that looked realistic.

As I didn't see anything that convinced me, I decided to look for AI pages that did it, and I was lucky, a couple of tweaks in NUKE and it looked amazing.

I composed clouds, fog, fires, smoke, explosions, laser shots, birds, rats, all by 3D projections, and this was the result.

Thanks for reading me.