Steven Walker, a freelance artist who has worked on numerous projects including "Spawn", "Titanic", "Star Trek: Insurrection", "Titan A.E.", CBS Sports opening, Claritin commercials, and the Dodgers Jumbotron, begins his next work with total destruction in the Feature Film Ticker. A film by Albert Pyun starring Steven Siegal for Filmwerks.

Steven takes the pleasure in sharing some of his proceedures in blowing up and bringing down buildings using some of his dynamic construction tools ElectricImage with Northern Lights Blaster, FormZ, AfterEffects, and Photoshop.

High definition photo of the building click image to see full size

Setting Up the Footage:
At the start of the project the only provided element was a high definition photo of the building. In Photoshop, the picture was manually divided into layers and reconstructed to be used as a matte painting that would eventually be projected onto the 3D geometry using a technique called 'camera mapping'. Several major aspects were changed from the original photo. First, the foreground cars were removed and the ground repainted. Second, because this image was to be projected onto 3D geometry, I needed to remove the shadows and effectively flatten the value of light across the image. This way, the lighting would be rendered in 3D, and eventually it was even changed to a different time of day, accounting for the noticeably warmer color tones in the final shot. Third, anything that was behind the building and to be exposed after the explosion, was created on a background layer. The skyscraper too was completely put on it's own layer, for it too falls in the explosion.

"Notice how the vertical contours of the buildings are perfectly straight up and down" click image to see full size

Setting Up the Scene:
Using the photo as my guide, I built a 3D accurate model of the building. This was done in ElectricImage by matching the perspective of the photo, and then constructing the building with standard shapes. It's a lot like building blocks.

This proved to be especially difficult for the photo was taken using an in-camera perspective correction. Notice how the vertical contours of the buildings are perfectly straight up and down, but the horizontal lines show a very exaggerated perspective. There is no built-in tool for matching this type of 'distortion'. Through the use of a little trigonometry I discovered that I could match the effect by re-centering the focus of the Camera to the bottom of the image by positioning the image in a larger image and then rendering a cropped area. All of the elements were subsequently rendered with this camera setup.

Page 2: Modeling

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