This is a great story from Col. Jack from 2 weeks after D-Day.

wimp.com > remarkable experience

Today marks the end of my winter term, and the completion of my 2 minute previsualization final project. I busted this out in a grueling 48 hours of work, 40 of which I was awake straight. It’s a little rough here and there but overall I am pretty happy with it.

Things to revisit would be shadows fo’ sho, the flickering kills me. I couldn’t afford the render time to use raytraced shadows so I stuck with depthmap shadows. If I ever get around to it, I would love to add depth of field to the shots and include some sort of environmental fog. On this project I learned alot about Maya’s particle systems and really enjoyed creating the smoke trails. In a couple shots the particles are pretty rough due to some restrictions I was running into with ramp input nodes.

After the aerial dog fights it starts to fall apart a bit… When I was working on the tank/village shots I was starting to cut corners due to exhaustion and the need to meet a deadline. The most blaring issues I have with the final shots are the inconsistent lighting and the physically impossible motion paths for the planes. The 2nd to last shot of the spitfires peeling up after strafing the german column of tanks all I can thing of is this classic Star Wars quote, “Break off the attack! The shield is still up!“.

Anyways, I really just wanted to share this, I am relieved to be done with this term. I hope y’all enjoy.

This is a solo previs project I am working. Check out the animatic, composited from a bunch of scanned index cards I drew up. In a couple of weeks this will be a full 3D production.