| Igor´s Tutorial on recreating stylewar's "MTV weekend" using 3D Studio Max | |
|
Hi, i'm igor, I'll show you a way of recreating the "MTV weekend"-effect that was done by stylewar. You can see the original spot here. Here's the version that i made with the method i will describe in this tutorial: watch me! |
|
| 1a. Let's take a first look |  pic 1  pic 2  pic 3  pic 4  pic 5 |
| If you have a look at the animation you will see that it is a combination of 2D and 3D animation. There are some static backgrounds mapped onto some geometry and some 2D stuff in the foreground. Here you see some screenshots of the original animation (pic 1-7). Pic 1 looks totally flat but really is a pic mapped onto some 3D objects. Pic 2 shows the animation of the 3D geometry. In pic 3 you see some 2D elements moving in (the turntables and the monkey uncle sam). In pic 5 it's the pregnant woman. These 2D elements will be created in after effects. They move independently of the background and usually are just animated layers moving horizontally with some animated masks applied to them. | |
| 1b overview | |
| Before diving into the first steps of this tutorial i'll give a brief overview of how it's done and what to do. Pic 6 shows a typical transition between the scenes. Pic 7 shows the same scene from further away. Here you have a clear overview of the geometry in the scene. It's one big cube built from thousands of little cubes. To make the mapping a little clearer i made a screenshot of a similar scene with less complex geometry as seen in pic 8. Now some might wonder why it looks so perfectly flat between the transitions, creating the illusion of looking at a flat 2D surface. This is due to two things: 1. orthographic view, 2. 100% self illumination. To illustrate this i have made pics 9 to 11. Pic 9 shows what you'd normally expect the scene to look like through a camera: perspective, misallignment, shadows. Pic 10 shows the same scene with the camera set to "orthographic view" which is basically the same as the default "top","front","left", etc ... viewports, meaning that there is no perspective and no vanishing points. You still see shadows and shades in pic 10. In pic 11 they are gone and the illusion is perfect. This is because the material's self illumination is set to 100. Alright, now you already basically know how it's done and what to do. But you still might wonder how to actually create such a complex object without spending hours on it, and how to do the mapping. I'll show you this in the following steps. |
 pic 6  pic 7  pic 8  pic 9  pic 10  pic 11 |
| page 1 2 3 4 5 | |