1000 Cranes for a hospital room

This week I was asked to place hundreds of cranes inside Anja’s hospital room scene. She had a reference for the crane that can be referenced inside the scene.

I didn’t want to continuously reference the same file hundreds of times as this would make it difficult to work with alter on when the reference editor would be filled with hundreds of links.

To make things easier for everyone I decided to have one reference file with hundreds of cranes in and to reference just that one file.

I also fixed the string they were hanging from as they were a ridiculously large poly size for something hardly noticable. I reduced it from around 60 polys to around 4. I kept it at 4 incase Anja wanted a little definition on it.

To make all the cranes I took the original and duplicated them six times. I them changed the size of these 6 cranes so they are all slightly different to each other.

I then animated all of the cranes individually so that 3 cranes (one small one medium and one large) would rotate slowly as if hanging freely from the ceiling, to the left and back and forth. I then rotated the remaining cranes to the right and back and forth. This meant I could, theoretically duplicate all of these and have different sized, different moving cranes. They were all the same speed though. So I then duplicated the entire lien of cranes twice. The first set i made move slower than the original and the second set I made move slightly quicker than original.

I now have a complete set of cranes all of different sizes moving at different speeds in different directions. Nice.

I then simply duplicated the cranes several times until I had my very own Crane Clone Army. This is now set up so I can begin moving in each crane into the scene. This is the start of moving in the cranes.

It took me days to do, but eventually I had all the cranes in the scene. Anja said I could put them everywhere in the scene. But obviously not in front of where the camera was moving. I asked whether I could put a few near the centre so the camera could dolly past a few cranes which I thought could look nice. She said it was fine and so this is what I created.

She didn't ask me to do this, but I thought I might be helpful and do some test renders and test compositing for this scene. I created about 10 seperate render layers inside the maya file and rendered out each individual layer. I then imported them into AfterFX to test what it could look like. She said the cranes would appear in the scene whilst the girl is making the cranse in the room and whilst the camera dollys through. I don't have the 2D animation but I thought I would geuss some timings in accordance with the camera dolly that Anja previously animated in the scene. Here is what I ended up with.