Making the charge

I thought it'd be a good idea to talk through how today's 'Charge of the Maidens' scene was made- I've been intending since forever to get some tutorial material in here.

1) Inspiration comes in many forms, but often some of my best renders come from me spotting an outfit and deciding I like it. In this case, I'd seen this 'Maidens of Mars' style get-up some time ago and always intended doing something with it.

2) For a one-off render, I often find that a good starting point is to mess around with posing and see if anything works. In this case, I settled on this half-seated, half-lying pose, and straight away imagined that she'd fallen in a headlong charge and was being left behind as her friends ran on.

3) I've never seen the film or read the comics, but I've got a rough idea that there's desert involved, so I found a suitable environment, and added some extra figures. I find the first scene needs to just include the foreground figures, but I rarely actually render it: It's there to give me gaps to work in.

4) Starting left-to-right, I filled in the gaps behind the mid-ground runners. You can see how the legs of the mid-ground characters form a frame to work inside, making compositing the final renders into one scene much easier. I put in a few more casualties and plenty of running legs, using effect planes to create the dust. The outfit fits G8 as well as G9, so while the closer figures are full-poly G9 models, all the rear ones are the same G8 figure, but at 33% polygons, using the trusty decimator plugin. As you can see, I managed to get 9 G8 figures as well as three or four G9s, and I rendered the scene in just over an hour. At full poly, I'd have exploded my graphics card.

5) Now for the middle: More runners, another casualty, some missed arrows and more dust. Actually, they're the same fx panes, just moved.

6) And now the final render. Putting a figure really close in the foreground does two important things: First, it helps to create the sense that you're in the midst of a battle; Second, it fills a lot of space on the screen and saves you having to cram tens of smaller figures into the same space.