a bit of the storyboard - confusing, eh?

cloudy sky - multi- layered procedual textures

stone collumns 

The production of Mindfields was a challenge for me. There had to be many different locations, light and weather conditions.  every set had to be very large and detailed. So at the beginning I was not sure how I was going to handle this.The overall workflow was indeed a chaos since i haven't got much experience with making shorts.

I started with the idea of having the weather affecting someone's mood, or could it even make someone crazy? The concept of Mindfields is, that human has some sort of 'inner landscape' in its mind. Pollution and even destruction of those mindfields affects the condition of your mind, so what happens in your head when you're about to turn insane...?

Planes and lots of polygons

Another goal of this movie was to push up the rendering quality of weather effects such as clouds, smoke and lightning in Blender. So I went on and made many many pointless weather scenes without having the full story in mind. The funny thing was that those scenes didn't need any complex modeling, only lots of animating, tweaking, improving, drinking coffee, animating again, rendering and finally starting again ;).
The sky shot shown on the left, for example, is only made of one plane, a hemi light source and a lamp for the sun [Blender screenshot]. Later i added the cloud of flies. The flies were a basic mesh with many vertices and the flock animation of the flies was done with a lot of moving and rotating on several axes, additional movemant was added with Blender's inbuilt wave effect [screenshot]. Like this particular scene, many shots were produced and rendered until it was time to start on the landscape.

Still fearing the huge grass scenes, i continued by working on the field of huge stone collumns. At the first look the idea behind this scene didn't seem to be very complex, but this highly detailed rock landscape needed more textures, more polys and more lights! The result was a quite complex scene arrangement which took very long time to render.

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