The movie is one continuous piece of car physics, on one continuous camera.
It was a challenge producing an animatic that was hand animated and trying to conform physics to those cameras and timings. We ended up having to increase the timings on some sections and shorten them on others, as the car physics ran at different speeds to the animatic.
The other challenge was getting all of the environments to seamlessly match up using the same car pass and cameras.
The job was completed using 3dsmax and Vray, then composited in AfterFX.
On and off, it took about 6 Artists approximately 3months to complete.
I was the Lead Artist on the job. I produced some of the animatic, cleaned and animated the car physics (supplied by codemasters), and completed the lighting, compositing and rendering for the movie.
I really love the attention to the changes in the atmosphere & how it effects the camera/lighting.
<Tedious nerd questions> - Was the fire simulated? How many passes/channels/masks…etc. does a typical shot consist of, or do you try to get it mostly done in frame? <Tedious nerd questions>
Hats off to everyone involved - it looks fantastic.
- Was the fire simulated?
Yes and no. It’s a combination of FumeFX, AfterBurn and live action, all comped together. The majority is Live action though.
- How many passes/channels/masks
This is going to be another vague answer
It ranges from 1 render layer in one of the shots, to about 15 in some of the Gymkhana shots at the end. All of those will then have colour corrections, camera effects, grading etc.
I will typically split it up into these layers: (this is my AfterFX stack)
1.Lens Effects (water droplets etc.)
2.FX Passes (smoke, spray, dust)
3.Headlight pass
4.Grading (lens defects, colour curves, noise, etc.)
5.Fog or Zdepth (I generally use 1 for both)
6.Car
7.Foreground
8.Mid Distance (geometry)
9.Background (matte planes)
10.Sky
I will nearly always try and render shots in as few passes as possible, in fact the layers above are a lot more than normal. It just depends on how much control I need over the corrections of each layer. In this instance, I needed to balance the different BG elements quite a bit, so they were all separated out. The car is rendered in a sphere gizmo so that we still get GI and reflections on the floor, then a separate mask will be rendered if we need to fine tune the car layer.
Nicely done! hats off to everyone on the project, very nice comp! About this last one, flare=optical flare? color grading=magic bullet, colorista? since your working with after effects…
Good job like it a lot, and I just finished working on my kart got a good mood for racing!;),
unfortunately for me, Vimeo always stutters so i get the sound ok but the streaming images come in as mostly stills…which brings me to my question. The sound of the car, where did you get that? Was it recorded by your office or was it from a sound library?
mh
How sized is your renderfarm ?
I love it. And i showed my partner and artists here at Ideosfera. They loved it. All of then wanna buy this new game. lol
Cheers
Daniel Lieber
www.ideosfera.com.br/portugues
