Tech Specs

I thought I'd share some technical stats about the starfish trailer, for those who might be interested. This project will be my first in HD! And while I'm excited to see the final piece in all it's 720p glory (1280 x 720 pixels), I'm curious to see if I end up needing to buy another hard drive to store it. So at 24 fps and about 1 min 40 sec in length, multiplying by 4 for the number of average render passes I expect per shot, it should only take about 10,000 images to make this thing. Hopefully. Ha.

As far as software is concerned, the animation and rendering are being done in Maya, but the bulk of the modeling and texturing is done in Blender because I find that it's faster to model with and the sculpting tools are second only to zbrush. I'm also playing with the idea of compositing the shots in blender as well. To be honest, with all the recent improvements and some great features on the way, I'd probably be doing the whole thing in Blender if I was starting out now. Free software that's good is always a plus. And the whole thing will be edited together in Final Cut Pro on my happy little macbook pro.

Before I forget to post this, I want to share a fun glitch I had a few weeks ago in Maya:

I was pretty psyched that I was able to screen cap it before my computer crashed completely, but for half a minute, I got to see all these brightly colored rays emitting from the starfish. He must have been kicking some serious ass.

If you want to see an early test of caustic lighting check out this post from my secret lab.

That's all for now, stay tuned for more artwork...