Fantastic Voyage; Environment Test

The result of playing around with shaders, depth of field, and atmospheric scattering in Maya.

This is pretty close to how I envisioned the environments in my animatic, and they're inspired by the suprematist sculptures I looked at in my research.

The render is on the lowest settings, so it's pretty fuzzy (hence the grainy-effect). There's a lot of sub-surface scattering, so the render-times are very high; my PC has been capable up until this point, but I was looking at over 5 days to render just this draft version, so it seemed a good time to start trying out cloud-rendering. It was not too expensive, and rendered in under 10 minutes, which really blew me away.

Playblast;

(I made the animation at 25fps, but slowed it to 20 because it was too fast/snappy. Not ideal, but it doesn't matter too much because it's just an experiment)

Animated Geometry Map

I exaggerated the shimmy, but decreased the frame-rate by 1fps, which I think landed me in a comfortable middle-ground.

Still Frame

[ /\ From the Animation /\ ]

This was an earlier version, where the linework was less pronounced. I love the sketchy linework, but in this instance I prefer the softer look for the linework in the far distance, so in future I'll probably lean more towards this softer look for the backgrounds.