As promised, here is the first of the break downs. I thought the ‘rezzing’ of the bike would be a nice place to start as one of my favorite effects in the Tron films and the animation starts with it as well. In this first part, I will focus on the animation of this effect.

Before going into the breakdown, I’d like to show the ‘rez’ animation up close and personal. These are only the RGB channels. Quite a set of additional passes are rendered for the comp, so they don’t quite look like the end result yet.

The first animation shows the appearing of the transmission and engine:

View in full resolution: H264.

The second animation how the ‘body’ of the light cycle appears:

View in full resolution: H264.

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I finally have got some time to start posting some of the cool stuff I mentioned in a previous post. A little while ago I got contacted by Alex Lindsay from Pixel Corps to work on a testshot for a Tron inspired piece for SalesForce. This was one of those projects you have to thing about for well… minus 10 seconds before you say YES!.

In the early 80′s I saw the first Tron movie on television (I wasn’t at the age yet that I’d just go to the cinema myself). We already had a home computer since, I think it must have been, 1981 or so. The computer nerd virus had already completely saturated every cell in my young body (at that time that was nothing ‘cool’ as not many people around me understood what all this computer stuff was all about). However, seeing Tron (after quite a period of anticipation) I got really hooked up on computer graphics, which was rather challenging as our Phillips P2000T computer was hardly capable of doing anything closely resembling computer graphics. Anyway I consider Tron my biggest single inspiration for getting into CGI.

So having waited for about 29 years for Disney to finally come up with a sequel, I get a chance to work on a cool animation project based of an earlier vfx test of this new Tron movie. Suffice to say my ‘Yes’ came about as quick as I could hit reply.

Before I ramble on let me first show you the end result for this test:

View in full resolution: H264.
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