Floyd Bishop

We’ve finished the first version of the Frederator Studios production tag. We render everything in passes to allow us more control over the final image, so I’ll break down what goes into a piece like this.

Let’s look at frame 40.

We start with the background image. In this case, we know where the Fredbot is going to end up. We had some visibility issues with him standing against solid black, so we moved the purple nebula over so that he would be standing in front of it, allowing you to see his darker bits a lot better.

Here we have the text isolated. This allows us to light it a bit different than the rest of the scene, giving us a nice strong white front to read against the dark background.

Here you see the Fredbot’s flight trail. We do this in a separate pass to let us give the trail some transparency and some glow.

Here is the robot layer. He’s nice and crisp here, but we motion blur this layer in the final. Notice how well you can see inside his knee and feet areas. We’ll do another pass to help correct this.

And this is that pass. It’s called an Ambient Occlusion pass. What it does is to give you nice shadow areas in places where you have a lot of detail. Look at how dark the spaces between the letters are. The spaces where the robot’s body connects is also much darker. We comp all of these layers together and we get this…

This is the final comp of frame 40. You see the Fredbot is quite blurry. He’s moving pretty fast on this frame.

Here is the evolution of the project, from the initial production tag that was being used through to the final of the first version of the production tag. I say “first version” because we don’t know what Fred will think of it. Hopefully he likes it.

What do you think of it?

-Floyd Bishop