Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/14320
Interactivity n n n n Ilya Astrakan, CG supervi- Speedshape developed special tracking mark- ers for the stand-in car that would work in the low-light environment. in CG and not belong in the environment,” Hallberg notes. Car Talk Speedshape was the driving force behind the digital vehicle. Rather than model the vehicle, the artists there acquired the actual CAD data for the car and used their proprietary tool to tessellate it. In addition, they utilized Autodesk’s 3ds Max for the animation, textur- ing, and lighting. Also part of the pipeline was the Chaos Group’s V-Ray render engine, Te Foundry’s Nuke for compositing, and Assim- ilate’s Scratch for the DI and color. Finishing was done in Autodesk’s Flame. “Te challenge for us was to get all the im- agery through and not have it look CG—the level of quality had to be such that people could not tell whether it was digital or not,” says Meechan. “We do this type of work all the time, but had to take it up a notch for this.” Ambient lighting for the scene was captured on location using HDRI spherical panoramas. “We’ve been working with the auto indus- try for many years, and we have developed a process whereby we can import the raw CAD data and clean the surface, taking all the heavy stuff from the back and tessellating the front surface, which is what we use for rendering and animation,” explains Meechan. “We also have built an extensive library of paint shaders over the years.” While Speedshape’s pipeline is well tuned to handle hard, shiny objects, it wasn’t quite ready for the RED introduction. “Te Mysterium-X RED camera was new—it wasn’t even avail- able yet—so it took a bit of doing to integrate the latest build into our pipeline,” Meechan adds. “Assimilate gave us a hand with that.” In order to seamlessly insert the CG into the scene, the crew at Speedshape used Te Pixel Farm’s PFTrack for 3D camera tracking and matchmoving. sor at Speedshape, developed special tracking markers, built from LED pucks and Styrofoam balls, which were placed on the stand-in vehicle. “Te shoot was at dusk, magic hour, and a lot of the conventional tracking mark- ers do not work well in low-light situations like that,” Meechan ex- plains. Moreover, time was tight between takes, so they didn’t have the ability to swap out tracking markers when shooting the wide and tight shots of the vehicle. “Te markers had to sup- port all types of shots,” he adds. For the close-ups, a black cross was added to the marker, so when the vehicle was close in the frame, the exposure of the LED marker would blow out and become too large, and the tracking software would lock onto the Xs in the white background. In all, Meechan estimates that 90 percent of the shots were tracked. In addition, there were some fully animated shots. One of these occurs two-thirds of the way through the fea- turette, in the tunnel, when Tony drives up a varied adventure. “Tat makes it different as a film, but also as an editing experience. You [the viewer] are effectively editing it yourself,” he adds. Te group took the process one step at a time, editing the linear segments and then, at each interactive moment, editing the three versions (which are dependent on what the viewer chooses to do). Te overall length of the film varies based on how fast the viewer makes those interactive decisions. “We don’t know when you are going to click and what you will click (for choices), so we needed to load a lot of different assets, even though some of them will not be used based on your decisions. We had to find a way to do that and not lose bandwidth,” says Hallberg. “It was a technical challenge, but I think we managed. Te film will run fine as long as you have a sufficient bandwidth connection.” Unquestionably, the spot is new and geared for today’s driver. Yet, the starting point, ac- cording to Hallberg, was not determined by what was new. “Lexus explained that this was the first fun-to-drive luxury hybrid, and we wanted to focus on the ‘fun to drive’ aspect first and the hybrid second,” he says. “Because Using the new RED Mysterium-X camera with a 6mm lens enabled the crew to capture a 210-degree scene used to give the “rider” a wide field of view. on the curve while seemingly trapped. “Tey didn’t want the stunt guys to do it because it was a bit dangerous, so we did the scene in 3D,” he says. Final Touches Editing was done on Avids by Stink person- nel at the Speedshape offices in Los Angeles. Not surprising, editing this was different from editing a typical movie, says Hallberg. “Usu- ally you have one linear story, but here you have a number of tracks,” he says. As Brown notes, everyone who experiences the film has the car was not made yet, we wondered, ‘How could we give you a driving experience, when you cannot drive it yet?’ We wanted viewers to feel the fun of the drive, so we put them in the navigator’s seat and let Tony, a professional, handle things.” And he definitely takes viewers on a thrill- ing ride. And while the experience is exciting for the viewer, it was an even wilder ride for the production and VFX crews. n Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor for Computer Graphics World. July 2010 67