This is going to be a short animation, a sort of spiritual successor to my old BSG picture “Bombardment,” and also an actual successor, in that I’m using the same shells and smoke trails. Actually, I ganked the key and fill lights from that scene, too.

Battlestars by tan.j
Rendered in Lightwave 9
Composited in After Effects

The first shot is pretty much done as far as it goes. I’m planning on doing another two to four shots in this sequence involving an original series Cylon Basestar being blasted in two by this salvo.

I’m going a bit breakout-happy (it already saved my bacon since my first version of the interactive lighting from the shells had an excessively short fall-off distance and I didn’t realize it until I saw everything put together in real-time. It was nice that I could fix that with minutes instead of hours of re-rendering), so I’m thinking about slipping some more stuff into this shot, as well. I found a tutorial on AAA traces that I’m going to try out to see if I can get the wee little guns along the corners of the battlestars to do their thing. I’m also thinking about modeling some extremely low-detail cylon raiders and vipers to buzz around. A flak cloud would be nice, too.

I’m also going to be doing my first real attempt at modeled damage on the basestar, and animating stuff being blasted apart. If anyone knows any good tutorials for flak clouds, modeled damage, or blasting stuff apart in Lightwave, that’d be awesome.