Just a few questions to ask...
How long is this animation going to be? Is it planned for 5 minutes or 25?
How are you going to animate the characters? With the biped figure in 3dsMax or some other method?
And finally, what about physical ship damage? How will you create holes, explosions and debris?
it's planned to be more or less 2 or 3 minutes.
and, if it ends as I want it to be, intense.
either biped, bones or any other skeleton is basically the same. biped has motion editors, so maybe I'll use bipeds when the crew moves and morphing and skeletons in close takes.
as for the damage, there's not much time to
damage a ship, I'm planning to do a new take where those two ships I showed earlier ^^ (the saber and the intrepid) face the Dominion cruiser (in the sequence with the Sovereign) and it destroys the saber and leaves the Intrepid derelict with a few shots. and I intend to take the shot in a wide angle to cover as much action as posible in one shot.
the only take where you can see the damage just lasts two or three seconds, so I think I'll use some post-production tricks.
explosions won't be a problem. I can build up a sequence from NanoFX's textures. I got some templates from Detonation Films as well.
for debris, a crappy low-poly model, some basic texturing, PArray, Glow and some fast changes on the scene so you can't see that I remove the ship and place the model I'll blow up
I've already built up a test of it: the scene with the bugship. it doesn't have debris, tho. but that's the procedure.
EDIT: I'm including a captain in the stock crew. (the player, whoever he is, it's
someone, so
someone usually has a face)
I posted a poll to decide which face you like the most.
pics of each one included
1-Gregory McCray (stock BC)
2-Barney Calhound (HL2)
3-Wallace Breen (HL2)
4-Random capt.1 (facegen)
5-Random capt.2 (facegen)
6-Random capt.3 (facegen)
