TRON Lightcycle animation

I think I am finally all "TRONed" out now, the lightcycle animation turned out pretty good, rendering was fast and most of the time spent was in After Effects compositing all the lights, reflections and explosions.

In Cinema 4D, splines allow for awesome motion path directing, but the problem that I've run into so many times is that when you animate an object over a spline it creates jerky movements in the animation and it sucks.  The only way I have found to fix it is to take the spline out alltogether and manually animate using the spline as a guide.  But that way sucks because animating using splines cuts out like half of the work!

Since I've uploaded the intro remake I've gotten a lot of positive responses and messages, overall the TRON videos are very well received on YouTube.  I even met someone who is designing a video game and wanted to see if I would help render some cutscenes, so that's great exposure as well.


TRON Legacy Lightcycle Modelling Concept from Dave Spooner on Vimeo.

Still on TRON...

Yep, still on a TRON streak here... doing a Lightcycles sequence now.  Oddly enough, I've had better luck modelling my own version of the light cycles than animating them.  I used only reference pictures that I found online, as well has the first street legal light cycle, and this is what I came up with.

They are definately not the same as the movie lightcycles, but that's ok, I'm not one for copying designs verbatim unless absolutely necessary, I like my designs to have my own touch to them so that they are recognizeable.  I wanted to make the bike more functional, like the street legal light cycle, but give it the appearance as it was in the movie.

TRON Legacy Movie Intro

Here is my rendition of the TRON Legacy movie intro.  About 6 days total work, with many layers between After Effects and Cinema 4D.  Overall I am very satisfied with it and if this doesn't reveal that I am a TRON nerd, then nothing will :)

Cinema 4D:
-Created one grid of buildings using textures I shot in Chicago, cloned it 6 times and modifed their positioning to give the effect of a full city.
-Beauty pass, for building textures, roads, lights, and cars.
-Outline pass; a preview mode render in 1080p, and modifed the colors in After Effects
-Window Pass; a luma pass for window textures overlayed in After Effects.

After Effects:
-Grid lines: used Trapcode Particular for the lines and animated them along a camera path matched with the speed of the main pass in C4D.
-Transition effects between beauty pass and outline pass, glows and other color effects.
-Final Composition


TRON Legacy Intro Test from Dave Spooner on Vimeo.

TRON Legacy - Intro Update

The TRON Legacy intro is coming along very nicely, I have the final render completing as we speak and then it will be compositing time, which most of the work is already done.

There are four parts for my version of the intro which will vary slightly because I don't have assets to create Flynn's beachside villa, or anything good to replace it.

1.  Grid Lines - The beginning of the sequence is the grid lines just like in the movie, I ended up using Trapcode Particular for the lines along with lights and a little bit of Optical Flares to give the point a glow.  It actually ended up being pretty easy to do, the only problem I ran in is with animating the lights, I had to manually change the keyframe interpolation to linear, even though each keyframe on the timeline was linear (diamond shape), took a little while to figure that one out.  I also ended up not doing as many 3D building outlines as the movie, there are two spots where I have 3D light streaks so I know I can do it, it's just very time consuming!

2.  Tron City Outline - The next part of the sequence, which actually has two parts is introducing the TRON city as in the movie, the Grid Lines animation from above will composite over this sequence and blend into the animation that will reveal the street, top buildings and lower buildings in sequential order.  This animation was created using the preview render mode in C4D.

3.  Tron City Full Render - The largest render, which is a beauty pass of the same animation as the City Outline animation and will sequentially phase out the TRON City Outline before the TRON logo appears in between the buildings.  Everything up until this point is the same as the movie.  The buildings were textured using photographs of Chicago buildings, I also created my own bump maps and reflection maps in Photoshop for each building, that was pretty time consuming, but really worth the effort.  I created one grid of buildings with a main street with lights and cross sections of streets, and I duplicated and rearanged this grid 6 times to give the appearance of a full city.

4.  Revert Back to Outline - Here's where it gets different.  Because I love the music, I wanted to make sure that the animation is complete to the score, but since I didn't have any good way of creating the Flynn's beachside villa, I just ended up sequentially going back to the City Outline render after flying past the TRON logo and flying down to the streets and then flying up and towards the sky ending the sequence at the end of the score.

Total sequence time: 1:16
Total work time: ~5 days

TRON Legacy

Ok, I've taken my TRON logo and decided to build the entire opening sequence to TRON Legacy.  This is by far my biggest project to date and has stemmed from mostly the fact that I feel that I have one of the best TRON logo remakes on the web.  In comparing other TRON logo remakes to my own I stumbled across someone else who also decided to recreate the intro sequence, but it was rudimentary extrusion over a google map of a city and very very basic.

Last August I was in Chicago and took a lot of photos of buildings and roads and other fantastic textures for my collection and I took them and created building textures along with hand-made bump maps and reflection maps for the windows and applied them to my own city that I built for the TRON logo in Cinema 4D.  So far, I am VERY satisified with the results and it's been an amazing learning experience.

Here is a sample render from the animation:

There are other details to point out, I am currently missing vehicles on the roads, and from what I can remember from the movie intro there weren't any stop lights or light fixtures, just really nice lights coming from the bottom of the buildings a really nice road textures.  And I would much rather try and figure out how to use an extrusion map instead of a bump map to provide building textures.  Bump maps look great and all from afar or certain distances, but they quickly lose their quality when getting up close.

There is also the light strokes sequence before the city during the intro that outlines the ground, a few buildings and builds up until the city is generated.  That, I think I am going to do in After Effects using splines, and that's the other half of this project that I haven't even gotten to yet, maybe today, we'll see.

Plans for 2011

It's a new year full with new ideas and new adventures.  Looking back I see that each year has brought new opportunities and challenges that force me to break out of my mold and further define me as an artist.  Although my passion for movies and special effects really began way back in the mid 90's, my first real adventure was in 2006 when I was brought on to edit a short film.

But what's next?  If you asked me in 2006 what I would like to be doing in 2011 I'm pretty sure it would be completely different.  This whole adventure has been organic and evolving into something that I really couldn't see coming.

Right now I have two developing fields, motion graphics and visual effects.  Both have been a ton of fun an provided an extensive and unique set of challenges.  I still struggle with creating solutions to my own problems, so, learning is still a big part of 2011.  But recently I've been able to find my way out on my own a couple times.

Like with re-designing the logo on my Angler.digital website.  The challenge came from Nick Campbell over at his blog Greyscalegorilla to create a curved text, and I was able to accomplish this all by myself.  Albiet completely different and inefficient compared to Nick's methods, but I was able to do it!

And recently I've been working on a TRON logo, which the font is not available (the long T that curves into the top of the R does not exist in any available TRON font).  So I had to create it manually by outlining splines in and around the actual TRON logo that I got online and creating booleans from them and extruding them.  Texturing the logo has been a lot of work, but I believe it's very close to the actual logo.  Not to mention trying to figure out how to apply a rounded corner with splines, that was tricky!


TRON: LEGACY Logo Test from Dave Spooner on Vimeo.

Being self-reliant is extremely important to my career because it means that I am understanding the programs and being logical in my decisions and problem-solving.  I know that I will never be completely self-reliant, that would just be impossible.  But not relying 100% on online tutorials means that my creativity is blooming.  And being creative, as we all know, stems from knowing how to hide your sources :).

I just got in contact with Ryan today, and he wants a promo video to help demo his sound design.  I'm very looking forward to working with this guy because he does a lot of sound design nationally and can possibly be a source of paid work this year.  So creating a working relationship with him is important this year.

Here's to 2011, hopefully the year of the first paid gig!