Making of Illochim

"Making of Illochim" by Sven Sauer & Igor Posavec
One of the most difficult tasks was to create a huge and complex scene with a group of monsters and complex surrounding geometry. Even without displacement mapping, the scene had more than one million faces. By turning on all details on the frozen aliens, it was almost impossible to render the image. Therefore a rebuilt scene with much fewer polygons was used to allow for the light setup. In the end all high density geometry was replaced with displacement maps to allow short render times for the high resolution image.

In the beginning it was planned to fill the belly of the crashed Illochim space ship with eggs. But during production the hibernation
tanks became more and more important and forced us to integrate them into the organic form of the space ship. Therefore Sven Sauer had to develop a much better way of visually connecting the complex organic hull environment of the ship construction and the mummies of the creatures in the tanks.

In the following step of production the eggs were replaced with muscle tissue and veins. The photo material for this was delivered by one of our friends, a student of animal biology. The source for most of the images are rat cadavers. The Hero walks directly over the tissue
structures and a main artery in to the hearth of the space cruiser!

In order to achieve the huge size of the interior Sven Sauer has narrowed the perspective and moved the focal point lower. In the
background the first drafts of the vein structure has been implemented – at that moment there was still no focus on details, but just
additions of rough accents. But the room was still looking very small since the Tanks seemed like a 2d billboard in the center of the room.

As a solution the number or tanks was reduced to 3 in order to open up more of the background area. Afterwards the 3d tanks were integrated into the two-dimensional background image that contained the organic environment. A good way to amplify the 3d effect was to add strong highlights and environmental reflections to the glass tanks. From this point on Sven Sauer did the detailed paint work of the scene. The main goal was to achieve a simple readability and coherence of the image, the viewer should not be confronted with a puzzled patchwork.

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