The Russian Navy was a two hour History Channel Documentary about the history of the Russian Navy. It will include sea battles, various submarines, cruise missiles, and battleships. What I’ve posted are some of the shots that I’ve contributed to. There are many others so just keep an eye out on the History Channel. This project lasted from August 2005 until August 2006, my final year of college.
History Channel Writeup
For this project, I was placed as a Lead Animator because of my work on the previous documentary, Boneyard. There were 5 leads in charge of the different areas of “The Russian Navy.” These areas were Maps, Tsushima Battle, Submarines, Kursk/Cruise Missiles, and Effects. We worked with the rest of the group according to our specified areas. My general responsibilities were creating ocean planes and emitters (missile smoke, wakes, etc.) that the other Leads could import into their scenes and animations. I was also responsible for adding whatever effects were needed in the various shots. These included underwater explosions, cannon blasts, bubbles, etc. And last but not least, I worked on random parts in the other areas, like animating a shot or submarine.
On this particular ship, the Borodino, I modeled 2 lifeboats (one in the center of the ship and the ones on the back of the ship), the davits (hooks that hold the lifeboats), booms (the poles on the side of the ship) and the hull of the Admiral Launch (the mid-size boat near the lifeboats). As for texturing, I textured the entire hull of this ship. That includes the deck and conning towers (wooden control towers). I also textured the smoke stacks and the main turrett (the largest cannon).
This next shot shows the defeat of the Russians. Here we see more of the Borodino.
For these shots and many others I used Maya (modeling, animation, particles), Photoshop (texturing), Particle Illusion (cannon blasts and explosions), Realflow (ocean surface), and After Affects (compositing).
