This is the final area I cropped to work with. The main edit at this stage was to remove the glass panel in front of the escalator. This could have been left it, but I wanted to show some movement in the backplate, and the only thing moving there in real life was the escalator :) The elevator's movement is very simple, just a scrolling 2D bitmap representing the highlights of the steps.

And here it is, behind the hole in the wall.

At this stage, I proceeded to work on it as a matte painting, creating Depth in the wall, adding shadows, putting in photo references of a pillar into the background, plus a faux floor. The "wires" sticking out were also done in CG, like the concrete blocks, so that when rendered they will act like a matte, blocking the creature.

Note that for the wires, they were lit & rendered with a white self illuminated (SI) material. Once in photoshop, I use this as a matte to texture it. After which I had to match it to the background, add dust, shadows etc.

The walls were also painted on a "dust" texture. In compositing (later) I'd fade between a clean version and the dusty version, simulating dust adhering to the walls.

Here in the CG world, we create *sob* 157 individual front crack pieces. Thankfully only the splines had to be created. To apply a texture to the cracks, I first

a) used a Camera Map to project the clean backplate onto all the cracks.

b) Once that is done, I switched to an orthogonal viewport, and render the view.

c) This rendered, 2D texture is now applied over all the front cracks. Thanks to 3DS Max's stack based system, all the blocks can share the same UV map co-ordinates. The UVW map itself fits over all the cracks. Hence, each crack piece only takes a bit of the texture. I'm pretty sure other apps can do this somehow....

and hence, we get a locked on texture for the cracks.

A side note, apart from the splines used to create the cracks, the CG cracks were generated procedurally, and were generally quite low detailed. Once the simulation was done, I took the pieces close to the camera, and added in additional detail.

Rendered off a pass, then matched it to the backplate. Tadah!

In this particular example, I left out the staircase and put in some green where it would be moving.

I did some research on what was used to build structures, and came across these Concrete Blocks. The information online also had their dimensions, so I was set.

The difficulty was in creating the tiny bits - it had to be broken up, and then the uv mapping information applied/corrected for the newly created polygons.

This is another version. In total, the bricks were split up into 3 variants, or more, if I counted those done when I did my first revision.

Several higher-res versions were also created for pieces closer to the camera.

This is one of the textures that we tried on the bricks. Nope, it doesn't work, but it does resemble burnt toast =)

For the final texture map, I got pictures of real-world weathered concrete from Mayang.com (great site) as well as from my own texture morgue to create the textures.

The jaws were originally supposed to be of a different material (bone), but was decided later to unify the look of the creature. The model was not altered, only new textures created.

As a side note, the creature does not move on the six little legs! I'd added them after deciding the front portion of the creature could use some stuff to break it up. Think of them as the vestigial legs on some snakes - they're there, but serve little purpose.

Control of the character was based off ideas from Paul Neale (spline type controls) and Jason Ossipa (from his book Stop Staring)

The menu structure on the right provides individual controls for opening each of the jaws on the creature, as well as a unified "One-For-All" master control.

The sliders below control the amount of twist propogated through the FK skeleton.

At the very bottom, are sliders that control the "breathing" of the creature, basically by switching to a morph target of the creature.

Last to be added into the control panel was a random noise factor that causes the jaws to have additional subtle movements. But this wasn't used in the final animation.

With the mesh hidden, this is the bone structure. More attention was paid to the fore section of the creature as it was the only part of the creature that will be seen once it comes out of the crack.

There are some bones floating above the main skeleton; these are there for the "muscles" to bunch up when the jaws open. In any case, these are needed else the mesh will pancake if I were to rely on the original structure.

The legs of the creature also have individual bones for them, however the controls for them are the spherical yellow splines on the outskirts, just to keep things neater.

Larger Pic? Click here!