Story Start (nsfw!)
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You know, originally I was going to just have the one exterior shot. But then I also found a neat fluid sim that gave me ideas for cloud-skimming. I quickly abandoned the idea of an animation but later revived the shot for some still shots. I did produce a crude animation but without the time-consuming detail in getting it to look just right. Instead, it's somewhat bare bones but enough to get me some still shots for this page. Maybe I'll revisit it at some point but HDR conversion challenges mean it probably wouldn't look great. Honestly, the fluid isn't all its cracked up to be either, so this is probably the best set. Amusingly, the safety bag (with its glossy transmission set to a rather rough setting) took far more time than the other shot with its participating medium volume shaders. However, the fluid turned out to a nightmare to translate the colors outputted by Maya's terrible shader node into a form usable by Mental Ray. Eventually I figured out the obtuse per-vertex coloring and how to get the shader to produce them then the per-vertex values to be read into Mental Ray. Once I got that, the look improved dramatically over my previous Photoshop-compositing.

EDIT: Now updated with a few new panels! A friend suggested it might help communicate what happened here and I tend to agree. The extra shot of Yeltsin should also help orient his position in the craft and it balances better than a single, wide shot. I didn't end up waiting for the revised closeup versions of the ship, though. I really like the chrome here and it would've made me want to tweak the plane-lifter body thing too, lol.