I'm interested in creating a photorealistic city comparable to those in Lord of the Rings for regular use in a TV series, i.e. constantly viewed out windows, off balconies, during air travel in and out of city, etc. I've been tinkering with 3DS Max and am willing to invest the time to learn it well enough to transfer my hand drawings, but I'm curious if once it's built there is other software for adjusting lighting and time of day control one has in 3DS Max or if files need to be transferred to a different program to achieve photorealistic motion picture quality imagery? I'm not actually going to be doing to CGI, but I'm interested in knowing how it works for planning purposes.
Post-Production : 3DS Max for Photorealistic City by Warren Weisman
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Many of the cities in LOTR were actually scale models, not rendered in CGI. I believe CGI was only used for cities viewed at a great distance, such as shots of Weathertop seen off in the distance in Fellowship.
3ds max is very good for achieving photorealistic renders but you will likely need to use many passes such as depth, fog, different lights, diffuse, spec, reflections, ambient occlusion, etc. and composite the passes in a compositing program such as After Effects or Nuke or one of the many others.
Oh and my familiarity with max is fairly limited(I'm more of Maya guy) but you should be able to light everything with a physically realistic sky so changing the time of day or year or location should be easy enough.
Interesting and good to know Christopher and Corey. I was going to use the example of "Stargate: Atlantis" but we want something a little more "Wow!" than that. I'm just hoping to get something built and be able to use it from all different angles without messing with it again other than the passes Corey describes.
I own renderrocket.com ... I can provide you free render time if you want to have a larger render farm to prototype stuff
Thanks, Ruben. Just gathering info at this point.
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Blender comes to mind. You can take actual video frames and blend them with drawings. I'm no expert myself but know people who might be able to take you in the right direction. The great thing about it is that the software is free and incredibly versatile.
Gabrielle is right. Blender is a very impressive software package, especially considering that it is free. And there are lots of good tutorials on how to use Blender on the internet. Also, if you have access to Adobe After Effects, check out what Andrew Kramer is doing with cityscapes at www.videocopilot.net.