I was helping out with Shapeshifter’s latest vid, Twin Galaxies, directed by Matt Pitt. (aka redKidOne) I was just involved in the first couple of shots at the start, with the dead Tree God. Matt is an amazing artist himself, and he had some pretty rad concept drawings for this that I was to model. I also had to model the Tree God’s face, and break it apart as if it was disintegrating.

Since they were both static models,  the low poly was modelled in pose in Maya, then brought across into Mudbox for a sculpt. We had decided pretty early on that we weren’t going to use displacement, so we exported normals and used those, as well as an ambient occlusion pass , since there wasn’t going to be any Geo to get the extra darkness in the cracks.

For the actual breaking apart, Maya’s shatter wasn’t going to cut it, so I got a 30 day trial of DMM (http://www.pixelux.com/dmmPlugin.html), hoping I was able to finish the shot within that 30 day period. It took a while to set up the actual fracturing mesh, and going through the various simulations took some time. In the end it was a combination of that, and AE’s Particular for the small splinters.

You really have to hand it to Matt, he completed this video in 3 months with a tiny budget, and this is an incredibly ambitious look and style which we had to pull off. He was also the only animator on the project, which meant he took on a massive bulk of the work. Another solid artist, Matthew Tan, sculpted the Main Rock God character, and together with Matt they churned through the final renders in an incredibly short space of time.  I had an amazing time working on the small part I did, but the hard labour was really done by those two.