Dronez
- Studio
- German Film School for Digital Production
Synopsis
In a top-secret research station in the cold of Siberia, the Russian military tests a newly developed battle robot. It fights alone against a multitude of attacking drones. But the machine's enormous artificial intelligence is what leads to its fate.
Characters
Robot, Drones
Credits
Directing
Animation
- Animator
- Alexander Hupperich, Manuel Macha, Leif-Arne Petersen
- Additional Animation
- Paul Dreisen
Voices
Production notes
Combined live action and 3D characters and environments (Maya, Photoshop, Deep Paint, Maya, Combustion, After Effects).
This student film completed in just five months during the students' spare time.
Said director Leif Arne Petersen: "We wanted an action-oriented, photorealistic animation for our show reels, and we knew we could create one with Maya."
During pre-production, the students developed the storyline and wrote the script; Alexander Hupperich drew the concept art. The group decided that the human characters and the main set would be shot on film, with the robot created digitally. The set, a run-down building used as a Second World War command post for German artillery, was measured by the students, who re-created it in Maya onsite on a laptop. They used this model in the animatic that they built in Maya to help plan their shots.
Background plates of the main set and the actors were shot borrowing lights and cameras from a crew shooting a music video on the premises. They learned, though that the set in the animatic worked better than the live footage. "We didn't get the camera moves and angles we wanted with the real camera. So Alex decided to rebuild a high-res version of the set in Maya," Petersen said.
Hupperich built and surfaced the main set and mountain environment, texture mapping onto Maya photographs of the real set's interior and real mountains. Manuel Macha built the robot based on Hupperich's sketches; this was textured by Hupperich. Petersen and Macha animated the robot; Petersen modeled and textured the four flying "dronez" which attack the robot. The robot was rendered by Hupperich, who animated most of the flying dronez with Paul Dreisen's help. Petersen, Macha and Dreisen created effects; Dreisen built the main set's corridors.
The team built all the models using a combination of Maya's NURBS, polygon, and subdivision surface tools, Petersen said.
Fog was simulated and rendered with Maya Fluid Effects.
"We used MEL to create a user interface, or window, for the robot. In this window, we had an image of the robot with all its parts labeled with buttons and sliders. We could select those controls through this window, hide everything except the low-resolution geometry, and concentrate on animating," Petersen recalled.
Maya's Trax Non-Linear Motion Compositor, was also used for animation, enabling non-destructive mixing and editing of poses and animation clips. "Modeling, texturing, animation, and rendering happened simultaneously, on a scene-by-scene basis. Trax let us all work at the same time," Petersen said.
Maya's Software and Hardware Renderer was used to render all the CG elements in separate layers, requiring from 20 seconds to 20 minutes per frame. "In this phase, if something didn't look right, we tweaked that layer and re-rendered the pass. We also performed color correction and added motion blur to specific elements," Petersen said.
Maya was run primarily on the school's Intel workstations. Adobe's After Effects and Discreet's combustion were used for rotoscoping and compositing, Discreet's edit and Avid's Media Composer for editing, and Adobe's Photoshop to paint textures. RE: Vision Effects' ReelSmart plug-in was used for motion blur, and Frischluft's Lenscare plug-in for depth of field.
This student film completed in just five months during the students' spare time.
Said director Leif Arne Petersen: "We wanted an action-oriented, photorealistic animation for our show reels, and we knew we could create one with Maya."
During pre-production, the students developed the storyline and wrote the script; Alexander Hupperich drew the concept art. The group decided that the human characters and the main set would be shot on film, with the robot created digitally. The set, a run-down building used as a Second World War command post for German artillery, was measured by the students, who re-created it in Maya onsite on a laptop. They used this model in the animatic that they built in Maya to help plan their shots.
Background plates of the main set and the actors were shot borrowing lights and cameras from a crew shooting a music video on the premises. They learned, though that the set in the animatic worked better than the live footage. "We didn't get the camera moves and angles we wanted with the real camera. So Alex decided to rebuild a high-res version of the set in Maya," Petersen said.
Hupperich built and surfaced the main set and mountain environment, texture mapping onto Maya photographs of the real set's interior and real mountains. Manuel Macha built the robot based on Hupperich's sketches; this was textured by Hupperich. Petersen and Macha animated the robot; Petersen modeled and textured the four flying "dronez" which attack the robot. The robot was rendered by Hupperich, who animated most of the flying dronez with Paul Dreisen's help. Petersen, Macha and Dreisen created effects; Dreisen built the main set's corridors.
The team built all the models using a combination of Maya's NURBS, polygon, and subdivision surface tools, Petersen said.
Fog was simulated and rendered with Maya Fluid Effects.
"We used MEL to create a user interface, or window, for the robot. In this window, we had an image of the robot with all its parts labeled with buttons and sliders. We could select those controls through this window, hide everything except the low-resolution geometry, and concentrate on animating," Petersen recalled.
Maya's Trax Non-Linear Motion Compositor, was also used for animation, enabling non-destructive mixing and editing of poses and animation clips. "Modeling, texturing, animation, and rendering happened simultaneously, on a scene-by-scene basis. Trax let us all work at the same time," Petersen said.
Maya's Software and Hardware Renderer was used to render all the CG elements in separate layers, requiring from 20 seconds to 20 minutes per frame. "In this phase, if something didn't look right, we tweaked that layer and re-rendered the pass. We also performed color correction and added motion blur to specific elements," Petersen said.
Maya was run primarily on the school's Intel workstations. Adobe's After Effects and Discreet's combustion were used for rotoscoping and compositing, Discreet's edit and Avid's Media Composer for editing, and Adobe's Photoshop to paint textures. RE: Vision Effects' ReelSmart plug-in was used for motion blur, and Frischluft's Lenscare plug-in for depth of field.