I have been planning on writing this post for a while and now I have the artwork to show for it. One of the reasons I chose this workflow for Cosmic Rage, was that I could model environments in 3D and position cameras around to capture different backgrounds that I need. For instance, the image below is one of how my 3D environment is set up.

You can see several views, all wireframes, of the ring, lighting and notable scene items such as; the ring, entrance ramp and the large entrance display. The 2 green outlined cameras, allow me different shots of the scenes.

The above image is a rough render from a camera. This will give you an idea of the textures for each item in the scene. The large gray panel, can be replaced in another program (After Effects) to provide graphics for the characters entrances.

In this shot, I repositioned the camera to frame up on the entrance ramp. You can see same blue barrels (with flames) in this shot as in the shot above. All of the objects retain their 3 dimensional space, so you need to reference a couple angles when laying out objects.

This is a recent image from earlier this week, again with a new camera angle. Again, all of the texturing, lighting and such stay the same to keep scenes looking consistent.

The above image shows that I modeled the entire back wall that you couldn’t see in previous images, so I have all 360 degrees of the environment covered.

More in Depth

In the 3D scene, I was able to make things called “object buffers” they would allow me to essentially cut out certain objects so I can place things around them to make them blend into the scene. I’m trying not to get too technical. In each new shot, I can remove these “passes” or object buffers and I don’t need to continually set those up for each shot.

I can position artwork around in the scenes by placing “null objects” in the scenes and exporting them out. By doing this, I can track my illustrations into the scene and not have them float around in 3D space.