We revisit Antonis back at home in Greece. Tight deadlines and small teams are nothing new to longtime LightWavers but Antonis really pushed to generate over two hours of CG in less than ten months.
Ancient Discoveries III is a series on the History Channel in the US devoted to finding quirky, little-known facts about periods in history and specifically deals with ancient technology in warfare and everyday living for ancient Greeks, Romans and other civilisations that many of us have a passing knowledge of from school. Although Antonis is Greek, this had little to do with his being chosen to create the special effects for the series by the UK documentary production company Wild-Dream, as Antonis explains: "The fact I'm Greek was just coincidence, they saw stuff I did on the web.
They initially assigned me small projects and as confidence grew between us they made me an offer I couldn't refuse. Being Greek helped me get in touch with archaeologists and researchers in their native language." The call for him to work on the series was just the reason he needed to move back to his homeland after many years away, in Scotland for three years; England for ten and Australia for a year where he worked on the feature film Happy Feet, although not with LightWave.
Antonis set up his own CG company, vattica, in order to work on the series for Wild-Dream. The studio is equipped with 10 workstations with dual AMD Opteron processors, 4 GB of Ram installed and GeForce 7900 graphics cards. vattica also has two Intel Quad machines again with 4GB of Ram with GeForce 8800 Ultra cards. But even though he has so many machines, the company is still small with 80% of the work being done by Antonis alone, accompanied by another artist Antonis Nikolaou recently, but also with the help of numerous freelancers for building models or even complete scenes.
As he says "The team I'm using here is quite big and although they work from home, sometimes they come and work here as well, mostly when changes need to be made. When vattica was formed for the Ancient Discoveries project I had to decide to buy render nodes or put something extra to have workstations. The office we have is quite big and allowed me to equip it with workstations.
There was quite a lot of CG work for the third series of Ancient Discoveries, about two hours in total and Antonis had just ten months in which to create it. The work evidently wasn't just the credits for the programme, but I wasn't sure of just what Antonis had been asked to provide. So I asked him: "Imagine around 60 subjects, all with environments, x-ray shots (how the objects worked), dramatic shots like the ones in Troy, etc.. Now add to that a couple of crowd scenes like battles with a thousand chariots racing together and hundreds of soldiers marching, with a thousand ships sailing." Quite extensive then. But LightWave is often looked down on by users of other applications as not being capable of such complex scenes, so how much was LightWave used?. "LightWave was used 95% on rendering and animation and 70% on modelling. Many of my colleagues sent me OBJ models and I would just import them in LightWave and take over.
Antonis Nikolaou our main CG artist, helped me enormously building many scenes from scratch, apart from LightWave he also used modo for his modelling tasks."
