Project Review: Jack The Giant Slayer 2013-Key Art 3D Illustration PART I

 The very first beanstalk I did back in the Summer of 2011 for Jack the Giant Slayer went to finish here.

 Here is a render showing the geometry to see my build-out.

 This was taken from the above comp zoomed into, and subdivided as it was a close up render done at about 8000 pixels wide and it too was used in the finals here.

 This close-up render shows that I built the big leaves as geometry not a bump map fake. I wanted good light play on the edges and nothing beats real dimensional geometry for that in a high resolution 3D illustration for Advertising.

 This fun render has a classic "S-Curve" design to the vine so the main character could stand on the hump out in the middle of the comp.

 The Quad Polygon view shows the details for this S-curve shot.

 A vine bridge idea with the placeholder dummy used for scale and shadow, that was removed and replaced with principal photography for the finals.

 The last beanstalk render came this year last month in February 2013 for the final payoff poster here.

 Here I show the base mesh with subdivision off, a complicated build but so fun to sculpt out.

Project Review

Jack The Giant Slayer 2013

Key Art 3D Illustration PART I

Client: Warner Brothers Pictures via Cold Open.
Art Director: Jeff Barnett, Gardner Defranceaux.
Project Date(s): Intermittent from Summer 2011- February 2013

I had the pleasure of working on the recent Key Art for the new film Jack the Giant Slayer, and today I will cover the finished 3D Illustration work that I contributed to the finals for the Agency Cold Open. Thanks go out to this very creative agency, as I have been able to get onto these great projects over the last few years.

Apart from the standard 3D logos I do for many of my clients, I also get the chance to do these detailed props and environments from the films I help with in advertising, and with 'Jack-TGS', I was asked to help with the beanstalks for all the One-Sheet ideas, as the film was still in production back in 2011 when  I did my first rendering of the vines for them, since they did not have a single high resolution still to work with.

Building out the beanstalk was a fun modeling challenge, and as with most poster projects, I have an extremely limited time frame to work with. This point is something inexperience fails to see, in that when someone looks at a final rendered 3D image they divorce it from the context in which it was created. I often here a rogue critique[ see #5] as if I had the same time that the film makers had to build and develop the look of the prop, yet I usually have about 1/10th the time at best.

I had one eight hour day to reverse engineer, build, texture, light and render multiple images with revisions, and this is where being a 3D Designer rather than a "3D Carpenter"  makes all the difference in the world to the client.

This project spanned three years of work, and a few versions of 3DS-max[ 2010, 2013] so I had to re-link and revise the files in production. This is also a real work situation that many years of 3D illustration afford you to keep the client in the know as to the bumps in production.

Case in Point: For a short while, my main procedural plug-in was still being upgraded, so I had to keep an older PC all set-up with my 3ds-max2010 still up and ready to go just for this project since it kept coming back, even though I was in 2013 on all other projects.


As a side-note I had experience with twisted vines back when I was the Art Director on the TV animated series The Phantom 2040, and here is an early design sketch with some similarities.

A fun project, and this is just the first post in the series.

Cheers, THOM