Hi, Here is a new Blender 2.92 crowd animation rendered in Cycles about the Ancient Roman Empire annexed the Nabataean Kingdom, renamed in Arabia Petraea.
THE ARTWORK: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OoRNEJ
While watching some documentaries about Ancient Rome and the Nabataean civilization, I decided to make a new 3D animation project. By using the new features of Blender 2.92, I wanted to update my workflow, in order to combine 3d render with volume. In addition, I work on animation and integration of 3d soldier character, which is clearly not my specialty. The magnificent tomb, Al-Khazneh (or The Treasury) is created entirely with the Megescan 3d asset library. So, this 3d reproduction is not 100% historically accurate, especialy with the statues. This project was carried out over 2 weeks, during my free time.
Scene set-up
The 3D legionnary are organized through groups of instances, which allows to obtain an army without over-loading the scene in Blender. All the legionnary are High-poly 3d models. The scene is compose of two collections. The first one includes meshs like soldiers, terrain, environment etc. The second collection gathers volumes (VDB simulation).
To limit the rendering time, I render a first pass including only the first collection with the soldiers and the environment (render setting: 3440x1440p, 496 samples, with Motion Blur) Then a second pass with only the volumes, with the collection including meshs as a mask (holdout functionality). I lowered the samples to 96 and I deactivated the motion blur.
https://cdn-animation.artstation.com/p/video_sources/000/242/182/petra-combine.mp4
https://cdn-animation.artstation.com/p/video_sources/000/242/185/petra-pass.mp4
Workflow
Environement created with the Megascans 3d assets library: https://quixel.com/megascans/collections?category=environment&category=natural&category=canyons-of-utah
Assets animated on Blender 2.92 (+ Some animations from Mixamo)
VDB FX Simulation and Cloth sim on Blender 2.92
Render in 4k with Blender 2.93 Optix Cycles (456 samples) on a RTX 2080 TI (23 mins/frame)
Post-production & Compositing on After Effects 2020
Final mix on Premiere Pro
PC specs
I9 7960X
64GB DDR4
RTX 2080Ti
Thanks for watching
