I used a stylized dirt for the diffuse and built it up from there. Including the displaced rock chunks.
I surfaced the river edge
I surfaced the Jeep
I used a 3 layer frisket on the main body panels to get the feeling of built up dust over paint with bare metal occasionally scratched through. There is also subsurface scattering on the tarp to get the correct behavior of sun-lit cloth.
Another angle of the Jeep and it's interior
Party time
Playing the hits thanks to some graphics supplied by the art department
Close up of the Jeep
Here we see a good variety of the materials required. We have bare metal, painted metal, rubber, dust, and mud all in one asset. The door graphics needed to be projected in order to maintain good resolution.
A good view of the canopy
You can see how far a little displacement and translucency can really sell the look and feel of fabric.
Licensed to drive
me crazy!
I surfaced all of the junk yard trucks
Once i established how the metal was going to behave in the shader, i just had fun painting all the maps for these run-down safari trucks.
I surfaced this hood-top set
I surfaced this jeep and the effect in the next frame
Here I created the effect of molten metal
by replacing the diffuse contribution with an ambient one.
Another good shot of my jeeps
RRRRRRRrrrrrr
For this close up, i created a blood shot version of the eye-whites and re groomed the facial fur. A much higher density and lower fur width was required.
A funny diagram I surfaced
I surfaced the head dress
I surfaced Melman's head dress
I surfaced the ground plane
The challenge of this was to get a shader that would cover the very large set and still look good close up. On top of that, rocks and dirt are heavily stylized in this film, so no hi res photos, just paint!
Another shot of Melman's hangout that I surfaced
A nice wide shot of the set
I also created and groomed the grassy tufts. We used some of the tools we use on animals fur to get the tufting behavior of the grass.
So much grass!
All the grass in this film was 3D and animated. So every shot required specific grooming to work with the camera placement and the action of the characters. Rendering the frames at our desk tops took ages!
I painted the entire hot lava swirl element
A chance to show off my painting skills I guess. I created a giant 16k image for this shot because there is a zoom the goes way close to the lava. I also created additional maps based on the "temperature" of the lava, that FX used to drive the behavior of the distortion and deformation of the planar element.
