Dome blockout, bridge detailing

The dome environment is currently at the end of the design/previz stage and at the beginning of the detailing / actual modelling.

Just a few minor props left to block out , but everything still needing many, many polies to look anything like a final…

Here are some shots of the dome and church sets : (still animatic level , materials and lights are totally temp ! )

Rendered in Cycles with the Tesla, 3-4 mins per frame is still too much for an animatic – and indeed we’ll probably use OpenGL render for it- unless we want to design/previz lighting already.

Then some detailing for the bridge and roads : i’m trying different combinations of shrinkwraps , solidify , particle scattering to organize these for  close-up (bridge) and mid-ground (rest of the dome) views.

After a few tests , it seems promising :  the risk is to rely too much on ‘heavy’ meshes for these tiny greeble details, but seems to be flexible enough for different situations.

And anyway , in the final assets , most of this debris will need to be simplified to textures or to a combination of sculpt and normalmaps.

Still to design and create the base for these details, mesh modelling is giving better control than trying to use just texture paint (e.g. over the placement of the damaged bricks along the bridge edges , now they’re quite regular, but i can quickly and freely move and delete them , and it remains interactive enough to tweak and correct later )