Into the Dark Dimension

“Into the Dark Dimension” is the final group project developed during our Masterclass at Skyup Academy called “Venus.”

Taking a cue from Doctor Strange_In the Multiverse of Madness, the goal was to succeed, in the shortest possible time and with the knowledge gained over the months, to achieve a visual quality that would satisfy us and come close to the references of the film's shot

Dream Team

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my group for their hard work on this thesis; each of us was very important towards the success of this project.

References

A great deal of research has been done to better understand the whole scene and the various assets. We divided the research into first scene (with doctor strange and the main metal gate) and second scene (with the temple and everything around it). We focused more on details and lighting, which was crucial for the second scene

Modeling

With the modeling lead, Tiziana Pirina, we divided the team into two parts, those who were responsible for modeling the assets of the first scene and others for the second scene. Thanks to extreme organization, records of everything that was being done on excel, and weekly meetings we were on track to meet set deadlines

The animatics were useful to us for reviews and checking room animations if they were in line with the references

A lot of modeling parts were hard surface and many were organic, and we preferred to make them in Zbrush to get a lot of details and details in the least amount of time.

We started from blocking the shapes to finishing them and focusing afterwards on the correct retopology for each part. Some key pieces for proper rig such as the security door

Texturing and Lighting

We focused on each object to get the quality we wanted to achieve, working by jumping between textures and lighting in lookdev gave us a clear and immediate response on the textures and shaders made

Animation of focal length, pan and zoom along with lighting composition were important to the success of the final result and a good basis for compositing later

Cover

For this cover we took inspiration from original Marvel movie covers and fonts, used the assets and lighting used within the thesis, only with something extra...shiny!

Matte Painting_Clouds

One of the most difficult choices was to render the shot divided into three parts: scene 1, scene 2 and scene 3. Scene three included the debris and the semi-destroyed temple and the Doric columns that were part of the environment around the main temple. Some lights we decided to do in compositing and the clouds in Photoshop and then import them into After effects

This was the final result, but let's see how it was crafted...

In photoshop we created various composition layers, did extensive research on clouds and reliazzarle some in procreate on iPad 11 pro and some downloaded in PNG.

After laying out the color backgrounds we focused on the composition, applying modifiers and always checking the main reference

Distributing the clouds in groups and then in various planes c allowed a good depth zoom to the clouds. We rotated a cam created in compositing to then match the rotation of the second scene rendered in maya

Compositing

In after effect it was critical, not only for composing the various render sequences and clouds, but also for lighting effects and adjustments to shadows, highlights, and noise.

We used the shine how main light visual effect, managing color and light parameters

For the end credits we used the "Red Giant Trapcode" plugin, particles to obtain this effect, animating the particles

We are very proud of ourselves and special thanks to Mauro Baldissera, Alessandro Maschietto and Chiara Rovoletto, and assistants teachers at Skyup Academy.

Thank you for your time and... Enjoy!