THE LOOK

From the outset we knew that we needed something that set itself apart from other Star wars animated projects, but we knew that we wanted to stay away from photo real because we wanted the project to be fun, and at the same time achievable in the limited time we had to complete it.

Traditional cell shading was out of the question, we knew that we wanted something that looked unique. As a result we came up with a simple process that used a mix of FG Radiosity and old features like gradients and diffuse sharpness.

Early in pre production Lightwave 9.2 was still in beta and one of the new features that had us really excited was Final gather radiosity. This new feature enabled us to render our radiosity fill pass at a much higher quality and provided a look that was in line with our needs, and allowed us greater flexibility in terms of lighting our scenes.   

After a little bit of post processing in Aftereffects we were quite happy with the rendered result, as shown in these test renders.