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LOTR fan film

polycounter lvl 18
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Ninjas polycounter lvl 18
A video I did everything on except the sound/music. Requires Quicktime 7.

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  • rooster
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    rooster mod
    wow man that was a lot of work! how long did you work on it?
    excellent job, really liked your environments. No crits, any small quibbles are way outweighed by the general quality smile.gif
    only thing is I'm not sure I followed the story entirely, but I haven't read the book I'm afraid so that might explain that.
    edit: the texturing on the cliffs at the start are my favourite bit
  • Ninjas
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    Ninjas polycounter lvl 18
    Thanks Rooster,

    It took me about 8 months of working on it pretty much every day. Some of the environments aren't as good as I would hope. There are things I didn't see until after the final render, and it was really a huge learning experience, so there are mistakes I made early on that I wouldn't make now.

    The cliff in the begining is mostly painted. In fact, almost the entire opening scene is painted and projection mapped, or 2d billboards.

    The story is beyond obscure, and you would have had to read the Samirilion (which I haven't). It is really for the hard core fans. Here is the digest version:

    SPOILER:

    The twin sons of Elrond (the brothers of Arwen from the movie, who also stayed behind with Aragorn) are making their way into Lothlorian to see Galadriel's mirror. In it they see from their past their stand at the Black Gate, and their rescue by the giant eagles. Then reflected in the mirror is the light of Arendiel ("their dearest star" from the movie) which in fact is the light from the Samaril, a gem used to keep evil at bay, which is mounted on the ship piloted by Arendiel (The sons grandfather, and protecter of Arda, the name of the planet in which LOTR takes place)
  • shotgun
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    shotgun polycounter lvl 20
    awesome!!
    i realy liked it until the cheap stars&lens flare effect..
    lol nah, amazing!
    and all by yourself, you say?
    did u also learn how to do all the anims and rendering by yourself?

    very nice..
  • Ninjas
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    Ninjas polycounter lvl 18
    [ QUOTE ]

    did u also learn how to do all the anims and rendering by yourself?


    [/ QUOTE ]

    Yes. It was a complete bitch. Never do anything with hair or cloth, because you'll regret it. I could have finished in half the time if it weren't for those two things.

    Mostly it was rendered in Mental Ray, but I used a lot of multipass rendering and some of the shots (like the shot looking down from the tree) were more or less faked in After Effects.

    If anybody here is interested in making cinematics in Max, I am more than happy to share what I learned in this project. I did this mostly to build my skills for doing pre-rendered freelance stuff (TV commercials, etc.) I think I'll be posting stuff more closely related game art here before too long.
  • swampbug
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    swampbug polycounter lvl 18
    cool man, This was the first video I watched on My ipod video. smile.gif

    Very good production. I think it was cool you did cloth and hair. You had a wide range of technical things to accomplish in this movie.

    After the 2 jump down the cliff, the camera fades to them walking in a forest. I found this fade odd because it placed them "back up on the cliff" from where they jumped from. Was that intentional?

    good use of soundtrack and SFX.
  • Tulkamir
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    Tulkamir polycounter lvl 18
    Wow, that was damn impressive. I can barely imagine the amount of work that'd take. Great job, a very impressive accomplishment.

    Although there is one huge problem I had with it... it broke my firefox browser. :|

    For some reason if I tried to watch in in Firefox I'd get a fatal error with it and it'd crash. Works perfect in IE though. laugh.gif

    Great job. smile.gif
  • Ninjas
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    Ninjas polycounter lvl 18
    Swampbug:
    Yeah. The guys who host the video/did the music are big Mac guys. About the fade; It is a straight fade but because of the colors it really does look that way. I thought it looked kind of cool, so I left it in. That and it was easier not to mess with it once it was done.

    Tulkamir:
    Yes. It was a massive amount of work. You think to yourself "oh, this scene doesn't require too much" but when you actually get in there and start, and every time you change something you have to render a test frame that at times was taking 5 minutes... well, lighting was a real headache, and getting the render setting right was hard too.

    I'll let the guys know about the Firefox thing. I personally use Opera, so I didn't catch it.

    Thanks everybody for the positive feedback. I was a little reluctant to post here because there are still a lot of problems in the final version, but I think maybe I am a bit too hard on it after watching it a few thousand times while working on it.
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