Making Of
Interceptor - Ufo Series Tribute
It was conceived from Franco Tassi, chief of TaxFree Film ( www.taxfreefilm.it ), for the science-fiction series UFO, a tribute to the fantastic “Interceptor”.
As for every work, we have started looking for all the possible material and, having on hand both all DVDs, the books of the “making of” and, most of all,
an expert of the series as big as Franco Tassi, it was really easy.
We have tried at the beginning to use just references of the original model and not to use all those images of models created from the many fans which didn’t have the details we were searching for.
The idea for the settig was to bring to light the past 40 years starting from the beginning of the series, placing the neglected interceptor on the moon, trying to imagine how time would have changed the scene.
Fot this reason we collected a lot of moon’s scenes in a setting with a light full of contrasts creating thus artefacts as lens flares and similar stuff for the camera framing the scene.
Modeling
I have started with the model applying a simple cube, “cutting and sewing up” patiently until I reached a proof I was happy with.
At this point I didn’t meet big difficulties even though the mechanical modelling has never been my main interest as I usually favour the characters.
The main difference was in the respect of certain bendings which should be reproduced in the best way not to create some unwanted specular effects and, most of all, to escape the rage of my boss! :P
As soon as we finished our model we realized that we could improve the details much better than the original model.
Shure enough they couln’t have been rendered very precisely because of the little dimensions.
At that moment we have taken all the real references of shuttle, motors, and so on, to decide what we could add without perverting the original idea of the tribute.
We didn’t want it to be a stylistic evolution of the spacecraft, but a more illustrative graphic computer’s adaptation
Texturing
The modelling was followed by the most complicated step, i. e. to unwrap every piece of the interceptor to be able to differentiate every single texture and to manage at our pleasure every zone.
There were many pieces and, to create the textures, I have started from a collage of very many pictures of the shuttle and of many sci-fi series.
Nevertheless in the end I had to draw 80 % of it by hand to adapte them to the various modelled parts.
For the shaders I have related to the various structurings of the classical “car shadings”,
trying to avoid the metallic effect and to rend in the best way the glossy steel creating ad hoc some specular
and “dirt” maps to render less glossy the parts which were damaged from the time.
For the moon’s shader instead I have preferred opting for a displacement using a mixing material between a rocky mixture, that I have created,
and a noise material so that it took on an alien form and not a polished one, given the lack of water.
Details
As I said, details are very important, most of all the study of the way one wants to render the original model of the series UFO
with more details but at the same time without perventing his nature.
For every piece there were many trials before arriving at a compromise which seemed coherent with the series
and with our will to bring to a maximum this wonderful series.
Lighting and Compositing
As I said, I imagined the lighting full of contrasts, with a direct light from the sun which, lacking an atmosphere, should create sharp shadows.
At the same time I didn’t want to loose the details of the motor and of all the parts I had modelled and textured.
In order to do that I have relied on two additional lights which shouldn’t illuminate but which were active just for the “specular” channel.
In this way it was possible to obtain a stronger visual impact even taking the chance on rendering the Interceptor less “abandoned”.
In order to realise this I have trust to some additional steps (to be made up next), among these the level of the specular to handle the light’s strokes,
the Z-depth for the field-depth, the ambient occlusion in order to render in a better way the contrasts of the parts which weren’t stroken directly from the light,
a dirt’s level to be composed in order to increase the damaged effect of the shuttle and, at last, a fog’s level to make the setting more epic.
