Death Star Landing Bay

Every image from the interior of the Death Star Bay to the widest shot of Death Star exterior was all done to the same scale.  That inner bay detail could fit nicely into those far distant bays in the exterior shot.  The camera could go from deep space with the equatorial trench in the distance all the way through the blast doors and down the hallway at the back of the bay in one shot.

My intent for going 1:1 scale was to do just that: Start with a close-up of a ship as it passes by and then the camera pans with the ship to reveal the Death Star in the distance.  After a short beat, the camera then follows it all the way into one of the bays - all in one shot.  The goal was to sell the sheer size of the Death Star as you approach it which is a shot you never really saw in any of the movies.  Everything was a cut-away to an establishing wide shot showing scale by making the ship smaller rather than a tracking shot following the same ship into something that was huge.

Now, the diameter of the Death Star is 200 Km.  But some of the ships are only 30m in size and some of the nernies on those ships are in cm's.  So as the goal was to show the massive size of the DS relative to a small ship, you needed to preserve all those scales in the same space.  So, it was a bit of trick as modeling something that big did create its own problems.  Remember, everything in the trench needed to be instanced along the curve of the equatorial trench. So, at a 1:1 scale, the center of that curve was literally half a Death Star away. 

I do like to see how much I can push C4D and my own ability to problem solve with doing something out of the ordinary...and by my own admission somewhat foolish. As a hobbyist my excuse for the sheer folly of these challenges would be "I did not know any better (like compositing in the ship to the Death Star background rendered separately at a different scale) as I am a rank amateur."  Professionals get no such excuses so they cannot throw caution to the wind.  They have something to lose if they mess up (their job) and something to win if they do it economically (future employment).  I have no such motivations other than to say, "hey it worked!"

At over 270 million polygons, I think I pushed the C4D and my GPU pretty hard and found its limits. I also checked CPU usage and even though the file size was only 68Mb thanks to instances, it was consuming over 28Gb of memory.

Animating will now be the next challenge.