By Chama

Since the theme for this Eurofurence is EFX - The Movie, I foolishly decided that I wanted to make a trailer for the event, based on my not very extensive knowledge of 3DS Max and my experience of... er... programming and music. :-) Little did I know how troublesome a task like that could be...

First came the music. That's a relatively trivial step. There's a simple chord progression set in motion by a flowing piano improvisation. Adding dimension to that is a choir of cape foxes (Vulpine Voices), harmonizing and adding dynamics, and finally sprinkle on a teensy bit of orchestral strings for the right flavor. Mix and stir in Cakewalk for a day, and out comes the sound track.

Then it got a bit complicated. There was just no way that I'd get the modelling done from scratch, so I started with rough public domain models, modifying them to fit the scenario and atmosphere and then rigging, skinning and lighting them. The characters were particularly difficult, as I had to combat the evil Character Studio and ending up with total frustration and dissatisfaction. I had to throw away most of the animation attempts as the public domain models withstood any attempt at reasonable deformation. A word for the wise: Don't go there.

Camera movements were a bit easier. I had some help from Tabalon with the visual impact, but all the mistakes are purely mine ;-). Many were the times when I accidentally ran a camera through a table and had to pick up all the broken digital pieces. The cameras are using depth-of-field effects rather than motion blur. Both are very expensive in rendering time.

The fur was done with Shag:Fur, and while that brings down any computer to almost a halt, if you're prepared to wait, it also gives some nice results. Rendering the final scenes took more than three days of consecutive computer time (not counting all the re-renderings because of computing errors and program crashes). Fur and depth-of-field together... ouch :-).

All in all, this trailer was a very interesting experience, demanding far more work than expected. Next time I try something like that, I'll bribe a graphician :).

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