Production Diary #2 - Creating the planet in the sky

November 12, 2016 Unknown 0 Comments

A few of the shots in the trailer includes a medium shot of the main protagonist, Nick Aries, looking at the large planet in the sky, and a close up shot of the planet as a large spaceship flies past it.

Creating these shot will require the use of different software, special effects and filming techniques. To create the planet, I used Photoshop to create the texture for the planet and then I will use that texture to apply to a 3D sphere within Cinema 4D.

This is the original texture:

As you can see from the image above, the colours are generally flat and dull looking. Within Photoshop, I have to use a curves adjustment layer to adjust the colour in the image. From the three images below, you can see I've have come up with three different colour schemes.

These images all have the same texture on them however the first image has a deep purple hue with gold highlights. The second image eliminates much of the blue and purple sections and is mostly gold. The last image is a mix between blue and gold.

The next step is to create the planet in a 3D software. I chose Cinema 4D because of its easy to use interface and its render settings can be customised to give the look and feel you want. In Cinema 4D, I added a sphere object, then on the sphere object, I applied the texture then rendered it. Below are the steps I took and the video at the end is just a showcase of the planet which has been rotated 360° so you can see it from all angles.

In the render settings, I've added a glow to the planet to make it stand out more in the sky. Whenever this planet is needed in a shot, I can easily add this 3D element to the shot through a compositing software like Adobe After Effects.