Bryan Ray, Visual Effects Artist

For my final project in Compositing, I was required to create two scenes of 5 seconds or longer using the techniques we’d learned in class. My Visual Effects Field Production class, meanwhile, had produced lots of great footage and assets for our use in later classes. So I decided I wanted to show our ship flying down the valley in our miniature and attack the gun emplacements. My reach exceeded my grasp somewhat, and I don’t have time to do the combat effects. The flythrough and environment elements did, however, get done.

The ship was modeled by Alan Province in 3dsMax. I textured and animated it using Maya. The miniature was built by everyone in the VFX class and shot on greenscreen. This composite contains four different angles on the miniature. The camera move was tracked in PFTrack, and that data was exported to Maya to assist in animating the ship. I pulled the mattes and created the engine blasts in After Effects, then the entire thing was composited in Shake. The sky backdrop and many of the textures on the ship are courtesy of cgtextures.com and used in compliance with their license.