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