2016 - 2nd Place
"This is the End"
by Olivier zibret - paris, france
From Olivier:
"This is the end"... What other name could I have chosen for my entry. I had no idea of what kind of title I would choose. I've found it the last day, when I was exporting the final version.
It is a mix of what's going on in my entry and the end of my One Frame Of White journey. Exciting, Inspiring, Challenging and stressful, but what a joy to have made it and what a joy to have finished it, because I still could have worked on it during months and months.
I had to work on it when I had time, during work when I could, after work and even during lunch breaks. I've worked on it during 3 months but I think 1 big month condensed.
I think that once you start working and having fun on this kind of project, it's difficult because you keep it in mind all the time and you want to only work on this project...
Even if people come to you and give you real jobs... I was like a child wanting to do nothing more than play with his toys. I'm kind of maniac with images.
I was looking at the OFOW website, like every day, when I started to think about doing something this year, trying to know if I could do something, because I was so impressed by what has been already released. So impressed by people like Greg-Paul Malone and Ivar Beer.
Finally, I said to myself (not what a wonderful world) but, why not, I have nothing to loose.
For my entry I didn't want to do just a technical demonstration but to do something more visual. I came up with this idea because at that time, I was working on a project on which I had to create a space shot, helped with the cg department. I had a lot of fun doing it, so when I started
to think of what I was going to do, I thought, why not doing a space shot entirely in flame!! 5 minutes later I was doing a linetest with two 3d spheres to quickly setup my shot.
It was pretty simple. A white Sphere for the sun and a grey one for the planet, nothing more, because at that time I wasn't thinking about the cosmonaut....
The most challenging things that I came across were the sun, the explosion and the cosmonaut.
For the sun I wanted to make a kind of realistic sun, so I started to search for references on the internet. I've used a lot of matchboxes. The idea was to generate different maps that I could play with and to use them as textures on my 3d sphere.
I generated many maps for my base texture and 5 or 6 in addition for my final sun. All animated and all 4k. Because I was starting my shot very close to the camera, I wanted to have details. My render time at this point was already heavy because of the 4k maps and my 1200 frames to render.
It took me a lot of time to play with every maps I did generate to be satisfied with the basic result. I didn't want my sun to look weird. That was the challenging part of my sun. When I was satisfied with the result I've played with a lot of colorcorrect, motionblur, edgedetect, glow, lensflares and rays nodes to find the final look of my sun.
Using another matchbox, I created the fire elements around my sun, using extended bicubics attached to a 3d sphere I did duplicate from my 3D sun.
There is a thing you won't really notice on the final render but I did enjoy doing it. At the very end, I did project the render of my sun on another sphere and with the help of a displace map, an atomize and a little expression, combined to a recursive op (a node that I really love and that I used a lot in this shot), I created a kind of atmosphere to my sun and little details to it. I had this idea thanks to my explosion.
For the beginning, I did use a fire preset in action, with a Z scale, reversed and modified with some motion blur, deform and color shifts.
When my sun was over it was easier to make my planet. I've used the same technic as my sun to create it, but with different maps.
The different thing is that I did generate a displace map and a specular map so my planet won't look to perfect, I wanted to feel some relief on it.
The next difficult thing was that I wanted my sun to explode and at the beginning, I had no idea of how I wanted to do this. I've tested things but wasn't satisfied with what I was doing.
And one day I knew how to do it. Remember that I love the recursive op? I used it to make my explosion. I did project my sun on a 3d sphere (again, I know but it was far before my atmosphere for the sun, I swear) and with the help of different displace maps and atomize combined all together with a recursive op and deform, boom! I had my explosion! I pretty love it! It's really visual and it's what I wanted.
The final thing that made me a little bit crazy was the cosmonaut. Again, I started with some researches on the internet to see the different kind of cosmonaut suits that existed to make my own cosmonaut.
I made the helmet with 3d basics geometries and 3d shapes with the help of some deform nodes. It was textured with substance textures.
The suit and the glove were created with displace maps that I designed and textured with diffuse maps based on the displace maps. Everything lit in action with lights, ibl from a pre-render and lens flares. This cosmonaut is very heavy to render.
Finally, the transition in the helmet was made with some deform nodes.
I think That without any pre-renders, my batch setup takes, at least, 4 or 5 hours to render.
It was very fun to do this OFoW challenge, you can really push your Flame/Flare very far, with your imagination as the only limit, because when you need to do everything in the software, you have to find solutions. You know your Flame better. You can experiment, try things you don't have time to try when you work with clients and take your time!!
I really encourage every flame artists to do the One Frame Of White challenge to push themselves in their entrenchments and really to explore things and even things you wouldn't have used for a specific task.
Finally, I would Thank the Flame and Logik community, REEPOST and Adrien Lepineau for letting me do this OFoW challenge, Thomas Bonnel my friends who is an editor and made me the sound design and my lovely wife who told me everyday that I was doing a fantastic job just to reassure me.