Making of Gladiatorby Christopher ADAJAR, Paris


I used the dust particles to give my shot a volumetric kind of dusty atmosphere around as well as the smoke particles coming out from the giant torch above the coliseum gate.

The effect was basically created using sprites particles with few expressions attached to control the behavior and accurately adjust it the way you want. Maya has a default sequence of smoke that you can found in the tutorials and extras DVD included when you buy the software. That was the image sequence I used for mapping the sprites.



Depth of Field

There are plenty of ways by creating a ZDepth Pass in Maya like; DOF rendering which is not advisable to use, render layers with use of preset luminance depth so on so forth.

This is the technique I used, first - I created a simple Surface Shader material and change the color into solid white, then I assign it to all the geometry in my scene.

Then the next step is I opened my render view settings and turn-on the Environment Fog.

Then on my fog node I turn the color into solid black and un-check Colour Based Transparency because if CBT is on you will have no fog in your render.

The beauty of using this techniques is you can fine tune your ZDepth which you would not be able to do if you use Maya’s native zdepth in addition to that, you can have a freedom by adjusting your zdepth value with Saturation Distance, giving a higher value will make your shot higher focus and lowering the value will give you lower focus on a distance.

‘This technique can save your time a lot; imagine my entire scene took 3 seconds to render.


’Note:
The saturation distance value is always based on how big your scene is.


Compositing

Finally, I gathered all my rendered images and composite using After Effects, there are several Preset Effects that I used like; FMP Enhance Warm, Grain, Plug-ins from Frischluft which is very powerfull by adding your Zdepth pass. If anyone of you is interested with after effects there are plenty of free tutorials and preset that can be found in videocoPilot.net

Note:
This is a summary explanation of the 'Making of Gladiator' the entire scene is absolutely bigger than what I have shared by doing these illustrations. Okay guys, I hope there is something in this making that helps you in your project and hope you like it. Thanks to cgarena for giving me the opportunity.

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