Terragen 2 used extensively for Paramount Pictures 100th anniversary logo

Started by Oshyan, December 20, 2011, 01:56:00 AM

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Oshyan

If you've been out to see the new Mission Impossible already, you might have noticed the 100th Anniversary reimagining of the Paramount Pictures logo. You might have even wondered what they used to create it. We're very excited to announce today that Terragen 2 played a major role in the project. In fact large portions of the sequence are almost entirely Terragen rendered.

Big thanks go to DevaStudios for bringing us in to work on this iconic and high-profile project. You can check out the new logo in high resolution at Deadline.com and watch a small video of the complete intro on DevaStudios' site along with some stills, but to really get the full effect check out Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol in theaters!

- Oshyan

Tangled-Universe

That's really great to see it in such a high profile sequence :)

And yes, I did see MI4 last friday and indeed thought "hey, I believe this is TG2!" ;D
The movie was pretty awesome btw, thin story but plain awesome action and very nice humour.


Oshyan

Can't wait to see it myself, hopefully later this week! I hear the movie itself is "a pretty good ride", which is about the most I can expect from the franchise. ;)

- Oshyan

chris_x422

Taking my son to see this this over christmas, as I'm big fan of Brad Bird, and was gob-smacked when I found out he was doing this movie, thought it was potentially a huge waste of his talent.
The new logo will be a great bonus, looks fantastic from the bits that I've seen.

Working in the heart of Soho at the moment and am still amazed at how few cg artists have heard of terragen, so it's good to see the profile rising.

Chris

masonspappy


rcallicotte

So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Matt

Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

chris_x422

Saw it last night on the big screen, stunning! (the logo that is, not so much the film)

Can I ask, which of you guys worked on this? and how long for?

Chris

Tangled-Universe

Is there a DEM-source for this mountain or was the terrain/heightfield sculpted?

AP

To me that looks like a very nice alpine fractal with very nice small scale fractals mixed in. Looks like angled strata and outcrops nicely blended in which is something i can not do to this day. Also i see what appears to be long channel erosion, perhaps the alpine fractal was stretched with one of it's perimeters somehow or it was ran through a height field node by the shader input and then eroded. I am guessing a whole lot here but what the heck.

Tangled-Universe

That's what I noticed too, but didn't ask ;)
The resemblence of the mountain between the old and new logo make me suspect it is based on a DEM-source or a custom made heightfield.

I once had a client who asked a DEM for a specific area, meaning that you can place an order at mapmart to have a satelite generate heightfield data of your desired area.
Costs a couple of thousand bucks, but you have your data ;)

Matt

Making procedural terrain match an existing shape is very difficult. An approach that we've used on a few different projects now is to model the terrain in a 3D package, export some heightfields, bring them into Terragen, add procedural details and render in Terragen. If you already have a model of the mountain, that's even better.

Another thing. You can make your renders faster by using planes that are the same size as your heightfields, instead of trying to render the whole planet. A completely flat horizon is slow to render at high resolution, even when it gets covered up by foreground mountains. Having the whole planet is convenient, but if you're willing to spend the time to build pieces of terrain everywhere they need to be, and only render those pieces, it might render a lot faster.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

AP

Yes, the DEM to match an existing shape. Should have known that. Went right over my head.    ;D    One could also carefully sculpt the mountain inside something like Zbrush and bring it into TG. Lot of work involved either way.

Tangled-Universe

Thanks for that tip Matt :)
If I understood correctly it is as simple as replacing the planet node with a plane object and adjust it's size? (perhaps a check on displacement tolerance value?)

Cheers,
Martin