Star field

Here we wanted to continue to develop our scene further by including different aspect to familiarise the audience with the setting. Firstly, we decided that we wanted to include a star field in the background of the piece which imply a sense of depth and distance. To do this we first began by experimenting with the exploding effect included in C4D's interface. This, exploded a sphere, leaving the fragments of the object scattered around the scene.

 We ultimately decided against using this method for a few reasons:
1. The several fragments included in the scene would increase the rendering time dramatically.
2. The fragments weren't the correct shape or small enough to look like stars.


We tried to overcome this issue by applying an image of a star field into the texture of a material on a  flat plane to get past the render time issue. However, this only worked with shots with minimal camera movement because as the camera moved, the edges of the plane would come into the shot and therefore didn't fill the background completely. If we zoomed in closer to the plane then the image seemed pixelated, so we then made a collage of images of star fields and then applied that to the plane instead which allowed us to make the plane larger without losing that much detail.

We also tried using the background tool which wrapped in image continuously around the scene without losing any detail. This works very successfully with still shots. However when it came to moving shots and camera movement there was a problem. Due to the fact that the stars were set as the constant background, they didn't react to the camera movement and just stayed still in the frame. However, after rendering the clips, we imported the animations into premier pro and then applied further zooms, pans and tilts which counteracted this issue.