Darin Hilton Art and Design

BATTLESHIP

Sky panoramas, Digital matte paintings and 3d environments

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Early morning, before dawn and the heroes destroyer is sneaking around Hawaii. This was a moving shot projected on meshes using ILM's Zeno software.

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Since most of the footage shot on actual Navy destroyers didn't include iconc Hawaiian landscapes and interesting skies, we added these in compositing.

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This was a comp concept to help guide the combination of a matte painted sky and cliffs.

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Another concept this time boosting the suns effect (the footage was almost overcast) Adding a nice sky and distant island peaks.

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Concept for the interior of the Alien ship. The interior was supposed to be moist and humid. The alien control surfaces I made up from concepts done from the art department.

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To build the interior I grabbed parts from the exterior of the ship and hand modeled the grill the aliens would stand on.

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I didn't have a lot of time to finish the shots, so I used mostly generic textures, relying on lighting and heavy atmospherics to sell the sequence.

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The finished shots contained lots of shake, dripping water, steam, volume lights and atmospherics

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I animated the control surfaces in After Effects and did physics simulations for the debris falling from the roof as the alien ship came under fire.

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pre dawn sky cyc done for the film, used in several shots and hand painted over a Vue sky render.

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Another dawn sky cyc hand painted with photo elements over a Vue render.

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Battleship (2012)

For this SciFi action film based on the classic board game I created several 360 degree sky panoramas, massaging photographic elements and hand painted clouds in Photoshop over sky renders from E-on's Vue software. To guide the compositing team I combined sky renders, ship footage and the 3d ship renders to create several concepts. I also completed several one-off projection shots to establish the Hawaiian island setting.

Toward the end of the project, the studio added interior shots of the Alien mothership, I designed, modeled and rendered the interior basing my design on concept art from the studio art department. To add life to the shots, I ran dynamic simulations of debris and designed screen effects for the Alien control systems rendering them as a separate pass. I rendered volume lighting passes for the compositing team, who did an amazing job of combining everything with water simulations, the alien crew, sparks, smoke schmutz and lots of camera shake for a convincing dynamic environment.