Interior Set Design Tutorial - ORB SILO

Hi everyone, it's been a while since I last posted here so I'm sorry for the lack of updates, but after many late nights in my man-cave, my latest tutorial is now up and online!! I've had lots of fun with this one and heavily inspired by Chris Cunningham's Bjork "All is full of love" video I decided to design and make my own interior set piece in SketchUp that I could render out lots of coverage in Keyshot and create some cool looking shots. I stated with a rough concept after seeing photos of a missile gyroscope, just the coolest looking bit of spherical tech out there, I played with how it would be supported, bars, pistons, cables, but in the end it was such a beautiful pure form I decived make it hover... Next it needed to be in its own space, something that looked secretive, like a testing site silo, with reinforced steel walls and cast concrete blocks. I also wanted to see some industrial robotics operating around it but wanted them to not obscure our focus on the Orb so I suspended them from the ceiling on a circular I-beam.

The set is modeled using the free version of SketchUp (Make) and rendered in Luxion Keyshot where I applied animations to the geometry to perform simple actions like rotations and simple camera move, the new ability in KS6 to animate with depth of field really knocks it out of the park in terms of creating something that feels cinematic. A touch of adjustment in After Effects was needs to help with lighting and colour grading, I was also able to drop in stock footage clips of smoke and blur them slightly To really help with the visual atmosphere. Applying a vignette is also another "trick" that feels cinematic, I often find that we see too much in renders, so most of my work in post is about loosing edges into darkness or light, lighten layers in Photoshop and After Effects work wonders to get back the depth you loose in a render, even depth passes can feel too clinical, they help nothing beats taking a brush and choosing with your eye what to hide and what to reveal...

Music also helps, I spent weeks trying to find a suitable track, I knew I wanted something energetic like dubstep as it complements the accelaraed fast cuts that I had in mind, but I was also looking for something more subtle, ambient and almost beautiful to got with the lead in animations. There are lots of great "cinematic trailer sound" packs on Audiojungle.com and immediately those "warrrrrrrrrrrrm" horn burst went with the reveals, I also found a rumbling bass background track to use that gave a sense of space and atmosphere, or inspired the other and the length of the trailer was growing, I still have ideas for how I would do it if I I did it again but I'd rather store them and move onto the next one, I feel pleased with the result and the response has been very positive which is extremtly rewarding!

So here's the link and video of the tutorial, I hope you like it!

www.gumroad.com/chrisrosewarne

http://youtu.be/Zsd7pzO8PEA

Cheers