This shot was far and away the most technically demanding shot in Hellbent
So here’s how we managed it.
Even from the animatic it was pretty obvious it was going to be hard. The camera was moving dynamically past an animating background with a SFX element in focus.
It was pretty clear to me this shot was going to need to be partly or fully 3d.
We’ve used 3d reference in the videos before. But this was the first time it would be IN the actual video, so I needed to convince Ben
it could be done and blended in a way that wouldn’t stand out awfully against
Kressent’s beautiful backgrounds.
I was able to get started on this shot pretty early but that turned out to be a double sided sword. I had time to try things but I didn’t have character animation or even final background reference until much later.
So I started blocking it out in 3d.
(old bg colors from the con preview)
Matching the 2d truck and van in 3d would have been near impossible, so I opted to use the 2d flash asset we already had.
Then the flash asset match moved manually to the 3d reference.
The shot was slightly re-timed from this version
(rendering the background to a video format flash can play turned out to be a real pain)
Next up was set dressing
Heilos got me a ton of nice little assets to throw around the scene
and starrrrsssss
I used blender and cycles for rendering. Lots of janky tricks. but here’s the main one for getting alpha textures to work nicely on the 2d billboards.
For weirdos who are into that kind of thing.
Then it was just a matter of animating the Fire moving through a windscreen and a complex 3D camera move.
Easy!
At this point I had the 3d render of the background
And a folder of swf files for each element in the shot. (using PBnDumbexport)
And it was up to AE to glue all this stuff together
Over all I’m pretty happy with how this shot turned out, few problems, some I didn’t even notice until doing this write up.
Kressent was literally killing herself with backgrounds so there was actually another shot that used this 3D background
software used flash cs6, after effects cc,
blender 2.7
Here’s a discord I’m on a lot if you have any questions:
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