Thought it would be good to show a little before and after. The screen above is taken from some pre-production on an upcoming short. Dave Chandler sent me the top image, which was exported direct from Cinema 4D. It was output at 1280*720, 4*4AA with ambient occlusion. It was a very quick render and only took a couple of minutes to throw together.

It’s interesting to see that, even with a very basic render, I was able to achieve quite a satisfying result. Perhaps not of a high enough standard to use in 4K live action but for something a little stylized and 720P it works fine.

Method

First thing was to texture the environment. This was done by simply overlaying a photo (of some Dublin streets) onto the environment and masking any areas I wanted to exclude. If I spent more time I’d probably use camera projection to apply the textures. I also added some people, again just an image from the web.

Next thing was to add some light and dark. I added a glow which seems to be coming from an above light source, off screen. This was done using 2 white solids and one blue, masked, with feathering and blend mode set to screen, adjusting the opacity until the desired look is achieved.

Next I used a curves and levels to bring the overall brightness down and introduce some contrast, which started to bring out some nice textures. I also added some rain using Particular. I used a camera to orbit around the rain until it matched the perspective of the image. Then a grade was added, a bit more contrast and cooled the image a bit by introducing some blue and green.

Finally, I included some lens effects to bring the whole piece together. I added some horizontal blur, grain and chromatic aberration which combined, gave the image a nice, gritty feel, (Probably influenced by the likes of Blade Runner, Se7en).

The last touch was to add some piping in the foreground. This helped give the shot a bit more depth. It can also add a sense of claustrophobia/confinement to a piece. This was done by using a rusty textured image I grabbed online, then simply masking the shape of the piping I wanted and finally blurring it accordingly. (again, with more time this would have been a 3D scene, so camera depth of field would occur naturally).

The first in a series of motion experiments.

Made with Cinema 4D, After Effects and Final Cut Pro.

The main piece was animated in cinema 4d using a sphere with polygonal reduction and a displacer, then I threw the whole thing in an array object . I keyframed the radius of the array and the threshold of the displacer (I think), to achieve the random spirally stuff. There’s also an atom array used to create the flat looking white line piece, behind the main object.

The main object was rendered with Sky sampler GI, ambient occlusion with a custom light set up. Anti aliasing was set 1*4.

All other elements were added in After Effects. 2D shapes, Motion blur, Text, Lens Flare, Vignette, Horizontal fast blur, Custom grade, Chromatic aberration, Grain.

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