Welcome to Corpus Christi

Act X's getting closer to done, and the two big cutscenes anchoring it (Dresden and Corpus Christi, respectively) are mostly done. I've got another video I need to build (which will be contingent on finishing the flying pig questline),  but at that point it's time to start assembling everything.

I had this vision in my head, of the eagle's flight being  used to set the stage for the battle, which forced me back into Blender to try to achieve my dreams. Daz would choke and die on something this big. Sadly, I'm no master at Blender, so it's been a learning curve :)

First pass.

Okay,  this isn't going to work. I couldn't see a way of getting from this to where I needed to go. Time to cheat.

Okay, that's looking a bit more like it. So how did I go about setting this up? 

I found this really useful tutorial about using GIS data to reconstruct a real world location. GIS data is the same kind of thing used to drive google maps, your GPS and other systems. In this case I'm first pulling down a high quality satellite image.

After which I pull down a very low-polygon representation of the buildings. This dataset essentially built from a 'depth map' from the view of a satellite, so you're obviously not getting a lot of data. But from a bird's eye view it looks okay.

The problem is of course that this data isn't textured, so we need to fix that. And I'm not texturing a city by hand, I've got an adult fantasy game to make. Time to cheat again.

The dataset helpfully has two different materials for roof and walls, and since we DO have a top down image of the town (our satellite image), we can use that. It's not 100% accurate, but it helps set the base color of things. For the walls I then used a mix of various wall-textures I downloaded from textures.com. Obviously the office space texture map is... not quite correct for this oil container, but...  it's never in frame anyway, so let it slide.

To break up the image a little I then took a couple of 'roof things' (doors, hatches, aircons, etc) and used a particle system to 'scatter' them across the roof. Turns out Blender has a very flexible idea of what 'hair' means... these aircon units are literally hair growing from the surface of the roof :)

I knew I wanted to have the eagle skimming the water's surface, and the water texture from our satellite image wasn't good enough. Time to cheat again. I'm using the awesome True Terrain Water simulation plugin to replace the original satellite image water, and then using a quick photoshop trick to mask out the water, and push it down.

The mesh is then modified using a displacement mod, setting white to move 'up' and black to move 'down'. You can see this underwater.

(As an aside, I wasn't aware the plugin did these amazing underwater sequences... I might need to use that at some point).

Given infinite time (which I don't) have, there's a lot of things I would have *liked* to improve. The mesh is quite low-res, and you can see places where it's not as clean a transition between land and water as I would have liked.

There's also bits and pieces of geometry that didn't get any polygonal representation. You can see the underwater marina here, as well as the water climbing up onto the road. Part of me gets itchy and wants to fix it, but it gets shouted down by the part of me that wants to get back to telling the story. It helps that this 1290 frame animation took around 10 hours to render, so my willingness to redo it is limited :)

The eagle was rendered in Daz (another 1290 frame overnight animation), then post composited back onto the finished video-clip in After Effects. It would have made more sense to render both together, of course, but I haven't really tried animating much in Blender. So we cheat.

While looking around the city to put together this little breakdown I came across a weird skyscraper hiding out in the ocean. I got curious; what breakdown in process had stranded a building away from land?

Turns out it's not a building at all, but rather the USS Lexington, an Essex class WW2 fast attack carrier that saw extensive service in the Pacific theatre. These days it's working as a museum, and is permanently anchored in Corpus Christi.

So that's the scene breakdown. Hopefully that's interesting for some of you. With this scene done I'm ready to finish up the writing for the Corpus Christi event; I have 4 real events left in Act X, so I'm hoping to get it done in a couple of weeks. 

Apart from that I've been working on the end of the Book; I've had a clear image in my head of the various sequences, and I ended up jumping forward and writing/rendering them out. Partially that's related to a really cool surprise that I can hopefully share with you guys soon, and partially that's because I knew there would be a lot of cutscenes that would need to be rendered, and I wanted to frontload them. I'm about 50% done rendering, and 80% done writing the final 5 days of the Book, so that'll speed up development of that a bit.

As always, thanks for the support, and hope you all enjoy the story!