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BlastOff! A 3D Animated Short
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LightWave 3D Props & 3D Sets from BlastOff!™
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Note: LightWave 3D files and high res images & videos are on the BlastOff! Special Edition DVD.
Since the primary set for BlastOff! was the child’s bed room, I built a fully modeled and surfaced bed room 3D set which included doors, windows, curtains, carpet, molding, switches and outlets. The walls are one-sided, pointing in, so that the camera can be placed outside the room and still see into it. Click on any of these thumbnails to see a larger, medium resolution, image of the set. I’ve included high resolution images as well as the full LightWave 3D object and scene files for this 3D bed room set on the BlastOff! Special Edition DVD for use in your own 3D animated projects.
I wanted to create a rich softly lit environment for the setting of BlastOff! that had the flexibility to handle the changing lighting during the main time lapse shot from dawn through sunset to evening. I initially experimented with using radiosity and global illumination (GI) but quickly determined that it would not be feasible for animation, due to the very slow render times. FPrime could render stills in a reasonable amount of time, but its lack of network rendering ruled it out for animation on this project. Even though I had ruled out radiosity and true global illumination for this animation, I still wanted a soft GI look but without the long GI render times. So I turned to spinning lights instead. Spinning lights are regular lights that are moved during a single frame so that the lighted area is blended during the motion blur pass. This technique can be used to create softly blurred ray traced shadows if transparencies are needed (as used in BlastOff!), or soft shadow maps for even faster rendering. I built a complete spinning light rig to illuminate the room using spotlights with expressions to control the spinning of the lights and also to relate the lights to each other for easier control. The entire light rig is controlled through the two main window lights and the sun light. Adjusting those lights’ color and intensity adjusts the overall rig lighting, including the ambient lights. This also adjusts the color and luminosity of the outside scene which shows through the windows. The sunlight may also be animated independently to control where the sunlight hits the room through either window.
This complete spinning light rig and all the control expressions I used are included in the DLI_RoomSet.lws LightWave 3D 9.0 scene file on the BlastOff! Special Edition DVD .
The other setting for BlastOff! was a space set. This set was intended not necessarily as a real view of space, but rather of how a space scene might be imagined in a child’s mind. So while based on reality, I pushed the color intensities up for a more vibrant effect. The focal point of this set is a Saturn object that I made out of a couple of concentric spheres with a center disc. I used this Hubble visible light image as the research for coloring my Saturn, and then I made it a bit more vibrant, as it might look in a child’s imagination. I used a gradient set to Y distance to object (linked to a null at the planet's pole) to create the bands on the sphere while using a procedural texture to displace the bands. I also animated the procedural texture slightly so that on long shots you can see the clouds moving, if you watch closely. I used another gradient set to incidence angle on a slightly larger sphere to get the bluish edge on the planet. To create the rings I used a gradient set to distance to pivot for the color, transparency and diffuse channels on a center disc. I also created another version of Saturn that I posted on CGSphere.com which can be seen below. One of the more time consuming special effects that I created for BlastOff! was the hypervoxel rocket exhaust seen in the video below. Hypervoxels are like tiny clouds drawn around thousands of little particles that shoot out of the engine nozzles. In BlastOff! the camera was focused on the space shuttle bed, so I didn’t worry about making the rocket exhaust hypervoxels dissipate realistically and instead just had the end of the trail fade out rather quickly following the ship, this way there were fewer hypervoxels to calculate and render in each frame. You can use this hypervoxel scene as a starting point for your own rocket engine exhaust effects, and adjust the dissipation as you wish.
This complete space set with Saturn, the star globe, nebula background and animated hypervoxel rocket exhaust as well as the CGSphere.com Saturn are included as complete LightWave 3D 9.0 object and scene files on the BlastOff! Special Edition DVD .
Whether you are simply interested in seeing how I made BlastOff! or you would like to make your own 3D animation, the BlastOff! Special Edition DVD includes a DVD resolution version of my award-winning 3D animated short film, BlastOff!, three additional versions of BlastOff! with behind the scenes commentaries, high resolution versions of all the images and videos on this page, a collection of set and prop LightWave files, additional behind the scenes content and more.
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