Roman Roads Previz

[sant0s]

Hey everyone

I am just working on a previz for a project.

Its all done in Softimage, rendered in Redshift.

Some of the models are freebes, so credits go to the turbosquid authors, textures are mostly from textures dot com.

Rendertime with Dof and Volume on 2x 1080Ti and 1x 1080 about 2-4 minutes per frame in FullHD.
I had actually only 5 days for that to just show, "we can do it"

When everything is cool, the models get animated in super, super slow motion.
Details like splashing water below the soldiers foot and wheels in slow motion will be added also and stuff like clothes and leaves gonna behave to the wind.

Still full of construction sites like flickering textures, missing textures, damaged geometry, bad blending between street and terrain etc.

The beautiful women leg in shot 01 is made with Pauls Fuzz (I love that plugin!).
Lots of ICE was used to scatter trees and grass.
The city is a mix of ICE and many, many compounds I found here in the forum as well as lots of tweaking by hand, based on a rome map I found.
Its not correct, but since its about streets and not about rome, I donw care
The houses are temporaer, gonna model some nice, roman houses as soon as I get the go.

Camera was done by my friend Richard Sako from p23.
(edit: forget to mention, the planet earth at the end was also done by Richard)

Version with no Audio yet:











cheers,
sant0s

[juanloredo]

Great stuff!. I wonder if those houses are instances (models) or redshift proxys....as well the trees? did you experience any slowdowns in the viewport with all that many objects? Really nice texture on the closeup street shot.

[sant0s]

hey juanloredo,
thx.

The trees are 5 different high res trees without opacity or something, just pure geometry.
I only scattered them as instances, but did not createy RSProxies from them. The first time the scene loads, its gonna take about 3-4 minutes, but after that it loads after a few seconds and starts rendering.

The city is one massive proxy from 9 big parts that I first scattered, aligned and than generated to mesh to have the ability to modify the mesh by hand, deform it etc.
I was first trying to create an ICE scatter system that aligns the houses as I want, but was to complicated in that short amount of time - so good old handwork.

The workflow is quite straight forward: create curves for all streets and align them to the terrain, generate one grid (street) with a high amound of subs in x or z axis, add texture_projection and freeze.
Than I used the fantastic compound PLND_Deform_by_Curve, copyed the grid and only had to pic the curve. That was incredibly fast since I dont always have to use the standard "Deform by Curve" and put all the settings.
Later its still easy to manipulate street width etc.
Than I generated a big grid (in my case 9 grids to have 3x3 grids to cover the city area and scattered the different houses with all kinda compounds.
Most important compound was a customized align by curve + delete near curve.
Next step was to generate from all the instances a mesh what I did with one of mootzoids plugins and modified the mesh.
I also used a modern map of rome as rotoscope to kinda align some houses.
But like I said, I am going to build some real roman empire houses and hope, it will get the typical look since it looks still very modern.
And of course I have to add the famous architecture at that time like the circus maximus, colluseum, etc.

There was actually no slowdown in the viewport, since I dont show the actuall instances but set particle shape to spheres or points.
When I work on specific areay, I always ues NULLs to delete everything outside the NULL.

The cobblestone texture is from textures com - I think its a scan and has 8k resolution.
For final version I will test the new Quixel Mixer... that looks so great and gives alot of freedom.

[mattmos]

Incredibly impressive to make that in the time you had. Very nice work!

[sant0s]

Thx mattmos!
Actually it where 5 days inlcuding some nights till I was falling asleep on the keyboard.

[rray]

Impressive stuff as always I can't imagine any possible way of doing it faster.

Please let us know when we can see it on the telly

*Password "streets" isn't working for me for the video

[sant0s]

hey rray, thx alot!
I think it will be broadcasted end of the year only - so still some time to go.
But I update the post also with the other themes when they are done.
I send you a PM with the video and update the one in the post.
cheers

[Bullit]

Very nice, congrats.