My Canopy Shot and Panning Camera Idea Tests

All the cameras and jungle sets are nearly complete and ready for lighting. For the past two days Myself and Jenny have been working on the last camera (nicknamed the 'the panning shot') and the final part of the jungle set, the canopy establishing shot. These were the hardest shots in the film so far, it was only hard because you need to think of a way of producing a canopy that looks great and vast, but build it in a way that minimises ploygon counts for rendering and general file size. After some planning I came up with two methods that successfully worked.

The first method was to create the illusion of the camera tracking through a long, dense, leafy canopy. For this I asked Jenny to send me a file with all of her flower and bush leaves seperated. I first animated the panning camera, so that i knew the distance that the camera would travel and finally stop to establish the entire jungle canopy a small distance above the trees. Using Jennys seperated leaves and flowers, I built layers of mixed leaves in front of the camera, doubling the thickness of the slowly forming canopy bush to create depth. I extended the bush upwards until the establishing camera shot was just framed with leaves. The playblast below shows one of my panning camera tests, though the speed is way to fast, the canopy bush idea was works really well, for the final rendered film i will add to the leaves at the bottom of the canopy and place vines reaching into the jungle path, this will then nicely result in the camera following the vines upwards into the dense canopy.

Playblast of Canopy Panning Camera Test

Screen Shot of Canopy Bush Area Build - My idea is that the camera will pass throught this area, the leaves have been placed, composed and layered to create the sense of a dense jungle canopy. I added large branches to finish the look.

Canopy Build Detal With Panning Camera Positioned

The second method was for the production of the jungle canopy establishing shot. The only way i could think of was to build rows of canopy bushes similar to those created for the panning through the canopy shot, but then take a lit rendered picture of the canopy bush, import into photoshop, alpha out the bush part of the render and apply the new .tiff to a polygon plane in Maya. Then layer up the planes, slightly varying the heights and types of the canopy bushes, as they stretch into the distance the illusion of depth and an endless jungle environment should be seen. After starting this I have now passed on the job to Jenny so that she can add a nicely painted background and create more variants of canopy bush. The job was passed to her as i need to carry on lighting the second jungle set ready for rendering on friday. Once this part of the set is fully lit i think it will produce a believeable dense canopy look.

Screen Shot of Canopy Establishing Shot Build - My idea was that the camera would leave the dense canopy and break open into a sunlit establishing shot of the tree tops and characters destination of travel, the temple. Using Jenny's alpha channels bushes i fgramed and composed the shot featuring the background landscape and temple (important audience focus point).