Making of Clone Wars Infographics

This is the infographic that went with the opening of The Clone Wars movie in Singapore. It was published in The New Paper on 28 Aug 2008.

I'll bring you behind the scenes into making of the infographic. But first, here are how the pages look like.



The concept is based on the Matryoshka doll. It's a stacking doll, where you open one doll to reveal another, and another. Quite appropriate when you're creating clones.

The dolls are modeled in Maya. They are basically modeled using NURBS curves, lofted together, then converted into polygons. Using NURBS circular curves, with history turned on, the shape of the doll can be adjusted easily on the fly.



Here's how the scene was to be rendered. We put big Lucas in the middle with the clones propagating out in concentric circles.



The textures are drawn by colleagues, and Star Wars fanatics, Simon Ang and Kelvin Chan.

They vector style drawn in Illustrator with a rendered wireframe for reference. They are then projected, using cylinder mapping, onto the polygon model.







And here's the layout of the scene for the 2 page spread.



The occulsion was rendered separately, to be applied on top of the coloured render later in Photoshop. The occulsion layer was given a multiply mode on the layer. It blends right through giving the dolls more form and contrast against the background.

Maya rendered the occulsion image in RGB. It's important when converting to CMYK, to have all the colours convert to K, and only K. That's to prevent ink saturation, which will make printouts darker than they are on the monitor.

2 area lights were used, with the direct light casting photons. A new rendering camera was created and locked. The camera was locked to prevent accidental movements. The scene was then rendered using Mental Ray.





The depth of field wasn't rendered but was created in Photoshop.

Layers were duplicated and blurred at different intensity using Gaussian Blur. The thing to achieve is, near the focus point, everything will be sharp. The further away it is, the more blur it gets.

In order to make big Lucas sharp, a mask was created for it. All the blur was created outside of the mask and so won't affect big Lucas.



And here's how they look when printed on paper.