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Antonis Kotzias

But just how were the large battle scenes achieved? Did Antonis use compositing or perhaps HDInstance to fill out his battle scenes? "No, I did the sea battle the old fashioned way, loading each object separately with low poly versions in the distance. I used a variation of maps and offsetting the sail movement so none is the same. Although there were only three or four different maps all had an in-house plug-in applied that varies the brightness, luminosity and hue so they all appeared unique for each ship. The chariot battle demanded hundreds of thousands of elements. We created the two opposing chariots, animated them so they looped and rendered them orthographically. We did many variations of small looping avis and placed them on simple polygon planes that moved on the landscape. We had some fly throughs of the camera and when it was too close we would replace some of the planes with the actual 3D model. The chariot battle was completed in two weeks."

These huge scenes were where the 64-bit version of LightWave came into its own. The major difference is the ability to access plenty of memory making it easy to render such large scenes without the need for compositing separate elements for images that looked good straight out of the renderer because the punishing schedule meant that there wasn't time for the niceties of extensive compositing pipelines, I asked Antonis his favourite thing about being able to use a 64-bit version, "I really appreciated just how stable LightWave 64 was even when it was using over 8GB RAM. In general, LightWave 9.2 is the answer to our prayers for this production." But this wasn't the best thing for Antonis on Ancient Discoveries III, his real labour of love was the famous Trojan horse. "I had images of the horse in my mind since I was a boy, having a chance to realise them was almost a dream come true."

So what's next for Antonis and vattica? Is he back to travelling the world? "No, we just started working on Ancient Discoveries 4, and have signed a new contract for an additional six episodes. It will be the same, but having gained massive experience with the previous one we will deliver more and in much better quality. LightWave 9 64's contribution to that is crucial, the new tools make so many things possible for us."

Before you go, do you have a little gift for our readers? "Yes. The HAC project was a project I had to direct, design, model animate and render. This gadget was once a gift from somebody and at the time the physical object had impressed me. While I was trying to figure out an idea for the commercial my sight fell on the shelf at my studio were the object was. That was it, that's how this ideas was born.
While I was making it I had MTV playing on the telly and to my surprise a Nine Inch Nails video clip comes up with the same concept. I later found out that Digital Domain was responsible for it. I was gutted ,still I had to finish it but I didn't bother to promote it that much. The reason I'm giving away this model is that it can be easily recycled, put any video into the nail displacement channel and immediately you have nails dancing around. If the video is carefully done you can have some magnificent movement and with the right render it will always looks impressive."

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Thanks so much Antonis and good luck with Ancient Discoveries 4! You can visit Vattica's website here.

Antonis Kotzias