Shop and beach scene

The shop, although not complex in layout, still needed a lot of work in regards to the creation of it's contents.  I think in total I had fourteen variety of luggage. From small handbags to large suitcases.  It was modelling these that took up the most time. 
I also spent a bit of time creating smaller items that you usually find in luggage stores. Things like padlocks and Passport covers. Even those these have hardly any screen time they still took a while to create.  For example the padlock boxes.  They were simple to model but because I didn't want to use copy-write material I had to create a padlock and render it out just as an image on the front of the box. It's not a huge amount of work but still took around an hour.  With so many small incidental things to create it was surprising how an hour here and there can turn into days.

The evil luggage, as I liked to call the bag he was thinking of buying, was specifically made to look a little menacing.  I wanted it to have a sophisticated look that you get when you buy something like an Apple Mac but I also wanted it to lack any character, especially when compared to the little bag.
So I made sure that it had a lot of straight edges and bland colours.
I also want to a slogan that would have a menacing undertone. It took me a little while to think of one but I felt  "Your life contained in style"  was quite well suited.

The beach scene was fairly straight forward in terms of creating the dunes and long grass. The dunes were simple sculpted from a flat plane.  Where as the grass was created using something in Maya called PaintFx. What's great about paint FX is that you can simply just select a brush size and an object that you want to create. Then brush that object onto any surface.  So in this case I select a long grass from the library available within Maya.  You can also adjust things like how it animates and how much wind is blowing through it. 

I probably spent more time modelling the sandwiches, apple and flask of tea then I did for the whole of beach. 

The sky and ocean were rendered by my good friend Wirginia Romanowska.  She got a real talent and can create beautiful looking particles and water in a matter of hours. I knew that for me it would take at least a few days to get anything that even looked half as good as what Wirginia could come up with in an hour. So I decided I'd ask her to see if she get the time to do something for me.  Luckily she said yes and what you see on screen is what she created. 
It was then just a case of slotting it into the background using After Effects.

Below is a short video where I talk about the two scenes

Going underground

Creating the underground was fairly simple in terms of the actual scenery. It's basically just two cylinders attached to each other.  The tiles on the walls were created using a texture and some bump mapping to give them a slightly beveled look.

The floor tiles were actually modeled, I knew the camera would be very low in the establishing shot and so felt that bump mapping wouldn't be sufficient in the detail needed.

Most of my time was spent in building the actual tube train which needed a lot more thought on the layout.

 
The airport was probably the most complicated scene, containing many shops and a burger restaurant.  I wanted to model as much as I could to give me more free reign on where I placed the camera.  This meant modelling parts like the ceiling and air vents. A lot lot of the shop interiors were "cheats" in that the stock and shelves were simple textures, that from a distance gave the appearance of a shop full of goods for sale.

In the video below I explain the steps involved in creating both the tube station and the Airport.  I forgot to go over the Tube train but the process is the same.

On the buses

Hi everyone!

Sorry for the slight delay in the latest blog.  Been busy with a few bits and pieces.

I thought I'd do a video for each scene in the movie to just briefly go over what was involved in making each set.
The first video's I'll cover the bus scene and the train station.

As you'll notice when you watch a lot of these videos, there's a large part of the models that never get seen in the final film.
This was mainly due to two reasons. One being that there's no way of knowing, even with lots of planning, exactly what parts of the scenery are going to be shown in the final shot. The second reason was some shots turned out slightly longer then what I'd planned so had to cut some shots out.