Sets - Exteriors

Exterior shots are always the most time consuming to setup, there's lots of little details to add, plus you want to avoid elements obviously repeating too much, while at the same time using objects over again to same modeling time...

It's especially tricky when your shot required a close-up set as well as far away details. Each of these environments took me about 5 days to build. Now that I've established the materials, stylistic look and build methods, it should be easier to create the other outside shot environments that I'm going to need:

This top scene is going to be a long render... the frame time is clocking in at about 5 mins per frame... and the shot here is going to be a good 30 seconds long... I'm tempted to animate this shot first and get it rendering while I build my other sets...



A lot of my time was spent optimizing the poly count on the market booths here. I've got high-poly versions of all the booths for closer shots, but once I started to fill them out like I wanted to, it was computer crash time, so I had to go in and cheat a bunch of the detail that I had put into the high poly models, I eventually got the models down to about 1/4 the poly count of the originals... the computer is still sluggish with everything on the screen at the same time.

This shot is going to be a "cheat".. in that I'm going to over-render and do a camera pan in comp... This makes life a little easier, since I can then render in stages, from back to front, and then comp in layers of actors who I have to animate into this scene as well.