Animation Diary: Fusion Battery

NOTE: This post was originally written October 2015. Originally I was holding onto it while I continued with the larger project, but I have since refined the focus of that project to where this scene has been cut. Posting this now for posterity.

I’ve been working steadily towards making an animation featuring a War Devil. The idea being that it would be presented as a commercial from the Overman Corporation, and maybe double as a book trailer for Spirit Tamer. However, it’s been dawning on me just how mammoth of a project it has been turning into. Originally I’ve been working towards having the animation finished by November, but now it seems like it’ll take perhaps another six months to a year. That’s because even though the animation is only going to be a minute and thirty seconds long, most of the scene’s are based in widely different settings. On top of that, it’ll take a lot of hours just to render out the scene.s

Given the amount of time that it’s going to take, and that most of the scene’s are still being worked on, I figured instead of beating my head against a wall trying to get everything perfect and then rendering the entire animation in bulk, my current goal is to render a scene once a month. After everything is done, I can then combine all of the scene’s into a single concise animation.

In August I focused on making a fly through of a Fission Battery.

Inspiration for this particular scene was to mimic the sort of concept I’ve seen in car commercials doing a fly through of a car engine. So starting with that idea, my general plan was to do a fly through of the internals of the fusion battery/engine, then show the entire thing and possibly display some overlay text. When designing this scene I wanted two separate points. One within the battery, then transitioning to view the outside of the battery.

Design/Planning Inner Rotation.

Inside the battery, I wanted the design to work as orbiting a central point, with sparks coming from the source of power. I actually came up with two different ideas for this animation. One orbiting something like a star, and a second animation that fly’s through a metallic canyon. The original was sort of my initial jab at what my idea was, but after figuring out a method to maintaining the camera, and modelling more integrate meshes, I made the metallic canyon.

Original Render	Updated Render

Handling Post for Inner Rotation

Ultimately for the final image, I settled with going with the metallic canyon look. It was far more colorful, and looked a bit more technical/busy than orbiting a micro-star. Next I went through the process of doing the post corrections. If you noticed in the gif above, there’s a bit of noise. I’m currently using blenders cycles render. Now one option was to use a higher sampling to remove that noise, but just from the sample rate I had, it was taking three hours to render a frame (there are 73 frames in the gif above for reference). Instead I opted to slightly blur and darken each frame in post. The noise is still there, but it’s not as noticeable. I also messed with the color ramps to amplify the coloring of the frames to compliment elements in the scene.

Pre-Production	Post-Production

Designing/Planning Outer shell

Just like with the interior of the battery, I came up with two separate design’s.  Originally I made a sketch, and modled that, but after a bit of thought I redid the model, and created something that followed the original idea, but had a bit more detail.

Original Design	Updated Design

Bringing it all together

At this point I’m still debating about post production for the outer shell. Just the final render as is looks fine. I am however debating about adding in some overlay text on top of the animation, but I haven’t finalized what that would be. Doing a bit of research and experimenting I threw together a basic overlay. For now, here is the final inner scene plus the outer scene combined into one with the basic overlay towards the end.

Final Scene