While at Ark, what little down time we had between projects was spent on internal ideas. Short films or set pieces that were valuable more for the process than the finished article. This is from one such short piece, a simple flyby over a snowy mountainous battlefield.

This was concepted by Steve Tappin, modelled by Craig Clarke and textured, shaded, lit and rendered by me using a linear workflow. My idea for the shading was that the craft had been heavily snowed on but had taken off quickly with the heat from the engines and anti-grav wings melting it resulting in water running down the sides. Add to that the atmospheric snow that would touch the vehicle and immediately melt.

Sadly a whole load of texturing was lost during a server crash.

Look in the WIP portfolio for a spinney (now in HD). Double click to fill the screen and press the HD logo for HD ..

Because this was fully rendered rather than a game mesh, the textures were often mixed together in Lightwave to achieve the desired result. For example the gloss map was screened over the spec map to ramp up the spec where required and the bump overlayed on the diffuse for some added punch. In the same way that we’d output multiple passes for comps, this gives us more control in the render.

Due to a WordPress quirk the direct Vimeo link in the gallery won’t let you display it full screen so this embedded version may be of more use.