Thanks for the compliments, everyone ^_^
Very cool Psiyon, tell us what you used to make it and render it! e.g. maya/vray
Some questions I have:
-The engine thrust, was it geometry with a particle cloud shader?
-Were the glowing engines added as a render post-effect (such as mental ray glow) or using After Effects with a separate white render layer and a glow or gaussian filter?
-The lens flare, I'd use Trapcode Shine with a 2D motion track, but how did you achieve it?
-The earth-like planet with city lights on the dark side, was that a texture switching thing using facing ratios with the sunlight or something simpler?
Great job, I enjoyed it!
Actually, the video was made using still 3D renders from 3ds max for the ships, and Photoshop for pretty much everything else. Essentially, I'd just render off a scene of ships, touch them up in Photoshop, and then import them into After Effects onto a background that was also made entirely in Photoshop. The illusion of 3D was just that--an illusion. Ships moved and were subtly scaled up or down as they moved closer or further from the camera.
-The engine thrust was either painted over in Photoshop (if the core if the engine wasn't visible to the camera), or a combination between that and a flickering lens flare from Video Copilot's Optical Flares plugin for After Effects (if the core of the engine was facing the camera).
-I believe the above answers this one.
-Again, all the lens flares were done with the Optical Flares plugin for AE. In After Effects, moving objects are pretty easy to work with because you can set objects as parents to other objects. Meaning, if I stick a lens flare on the engine glow of an already moving ship, it'll stay in the same place throughout that ship's whole animation sequence without touching the animation properties for the flare. The sun in the battle scene was achieved in the same way. As for the missiles, those were simply lens flares decreasing in size on a 2D motion track.
-All backgrounds were created in Photoshop. Some of the planets were saved as separate .pngs so they could move independently from the background, though.
(And just in case you were wondering: aside from 3Ds, AE, and Photoshop, I used Corel Videostudio Pro 4 to put the thing together in, and FL Studio to create the piece of music in the background.)
...Dang, after responding to your comment, I feel like I totally cheated while making this.
Holy crap psiyon!!!
Any chance you could render such a movie for my mod? Pretty please?
If you have the time that will say........
It probably wouldn't be possible (at least, not reasonably possible). The only reason this video took such a short time was that 90% of the assets for it were already made at some point in the past. All I did was render them off in 3ds Max, make some pretty backgrounds, and create cheaply animated sequences. So unless you've got a stockpile of 3d models for every ship in your mod laying around...