Read on

As mentioned, we were responsible for the shooting, so I was on location to capture HDRI images and direct the camera operator together with my colleague Ralph. Back in Munich I started to check the footage and began with the rough cut of the trailer. I edited in FinalCut because it offered a good workflow with the RED files. When the rough edit was approved I handed over one effect shot to the animation department where we wanted to integrate some CG elements to feature the new CTS technology.

While the shot was tracked and the CG elements were animated, I finished the look creation. For that I relied on After Effects and the great color correction tools in it. Furthermore I had to prepare two other shots, where Husqvarna wanted us to remove disturbing elements in the background. For that I used The Foundrys’ Nuke especially the build in caamera tracker was more than helpful. I tracked the shots, put in some cards in 3d space to remove the unwanted object and “rotopainted” the motocross driver over the new background. In the meantime the animation was finished using Maya and Mental Ray.  I composited the effect shot in Nuke and finished the movie in After Effects. This took us 2weeks, and right now we are working on the long version of it. So stay tuned for more.

]]> http://franzbrandstaetter.com/?feed=rss2&p=241 http://franzbrandstaetter.com/?p=228 http://franzbrandstaetter.com/?p=228#comments Sun, 21 Mar 2010 14:09:55 +0000 admin http://franzbrandstaetter.com/?p=228 A tough time lead to a great movie. Porsche asked us to create print images and a 1min long movie for their new 918 Spyder showcased at the motorshow in Genf.

Check out the movie here and read on

It was a top secret project so the production team was kept pretty small. There  were only 6 artists involved in creating the show, so we had to work on the most efficient way to create the best quality in only 2 weeks.

We came up with a light setup that allowed us to concentrate on the final grading, not on fixing render issues in post. So the studio shots turned out to be pretty easy to finish, especially the speed of Nuke was fantastic. The problematic shot was the last one, where we had to integrate the car into a real shot we had taken at the Paul Ricard racetrack.

First of all tracking was a real pain. We worked on the shot for about 1 week in boujou, but the track was not solid. After a lot of effort and problemsolvig workarounds, we had a solve that we were okay with. The next problem was a large shadow from the camera rig we had to remove. In this case Nuke X was a real help because it has the Furnace Core plugins integrated and we used rigremoval extensively. The rest was handpainted using the new paint tool.

As mentioned, the project was tough - having only about 3 weeks of production time - but we are all proud of the final movie, which you can see, even in HD here

Production Team RTT:

Animator & Matchmover: Ralph Lindner

Lighting & Art Direction: Robert Roither

Lighting: Jochen Neujahr, Wojtek Gawinek

Compositing: Franz Brandstaetter, Alex Seefelder

Project Manager: Bea Hofmeister

munich by night with the EOS550d from franz brandstaetter on Vimeo.

munich by night with the EOS550d from franz brandstaetter on Vimeo.

Check it out here

The A1 is a completely new car from Audi, and therefore the webspecial had to be something special. We were asked to create every CG content, including transition animations, a 360 turntable, a 30 seconds interior movie, a configurator to customize your A1 and a 30 second exterior movie driving in a fully virtual environment.

For the last movie we were also responsible for the creative part. So we came up with the idea, did storyboarding, lookdevelopment and finally produced the content with 5 configurations. Right now, we are working on the second film, featuring the car in a new scenario. So stay tuned and again watch out here

Check out the great final move on Thomas website here

Simple tasks can turn out to be more complex than you think. The tracking of the dpx files, that had quite a lot of grain, turned out to be challenging. I used pftrack to get the slight parallex movement right and by using a 3D Setup in Nuke the placement of the monitors was no problem anymore.

With some Keying and a bit of rotoscoping I was able to complete the shot in a day. Check out the great final move on Thomas website here

Make sure to check out the movie on the official website here

Read on for some details on the production Audi wanted us to produce a webspecial for the new Audi A8, so we were asked to come up with a conceptional idea. A team of about 5 people were involved in the preproduction phase, that took us several weeks to plan the movie. The production schedule was tight so that we had to finish a shot per day.

The good thing was, that we planed the production pretty much in detail, so that we could set up a base Nuke script for all exterior shots, and a base setup for the interior parts.  This was crucial to finish everything in time and to concentrate on making the details work.

Once again, make sure to check out the movie on the official website here

]]> http://franzbrandstaetter.com/?feed=rss2&p=202 http://franzbrandstaetter.com/?p=212 http://franzbrandstaetter.com/?p=212#comments Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:38:08 +0000 admin http://franzbrandstaetter.com/?p=212 Audi UK wanted us to create a number of animations and turntables, for the whole Audi A4 range, and the new A5 Sportback.

Check it our here

The production schedule was tough so we ended up creating 12 animations and 6 turns in only 2 weeks.

One of the most problematic things in this project was matching the startframe of each animation with the corresponding frame in the turntable. As a matter of fact, our animation department did not know that we needed a perfect match, so a lot of the assests had to be tweaked over and over again.

The good thing was, that we had a master script in Nuke as a basis for the rest of the cars’ assets. This, and a great effort of all team members made it possible to finish everything in time. Right now we are working on the rest of the entire Audi Range.

Check it our here

To find out more about the production read on.

For this webspecial, Audi asked us to create a fotoreal movie, featuring the new R8 Spyder in different environments. The idea was to start in a clean, calm city presenting the design aspects of the car. Finally the roof opens and the “race” begins. We wanted the car to drive through rocky environments ending on a sea side location to feature the beauty of the cabriolet.

Previz:
For the first time we based our movie on a mood-film. This is a common way to visualize the directors ideas using stock material. In our case I did a lot of research looking for different reference material that I edited in Premiere based on the rough story. We polished the mood-film until everybody was happy with it, and the client signed off the edit. We now had a perfect concept movie, that was our base for the animation team.

Environments:
The clients’ wish as always was to create as fotorealistic scenes as possible, in a really short production time. We did a lot of research to come up with a new approach based on projecting images on low-resolution geometry. So what we did was, based on our mood-film, looking for appropriate stock material that we were allowed to use. Our modelling team roughly matched the scenes and exported every geometry for us. We had the luxury of having HDR images for each scene as well, so realistic lighting was possible for the lighting artists. The projection was setup in Nuke, so we did not have to render the environments in 3D. This was a real timesaver, because the Nuke rendering was extraordinarily fast and using an animation previz of the car, we were able to check if the car was sitting in the scene at an early stage.

Compositing:
As mentioned above, for the first time we composited the complete show inside Nuke. Nuke was our tool because of its’ fantastic 3D space. We used our Maya2Nuke export scripts, that we integrated into our animation pipeline, so that everytime a camera was baked, we automatically got a Nuke camera as well. I setup a base script for our initial shot, where we tested the whole workflow, and we showed the result to Audi. The were really satisfied with the result, so we decided to increase rendering power on our farm for Nuke.

Finishing:
The finishing process was done inside AfterEffects. I was able to import the final edit from Premiere, so it was no problem to replace the mood-film material with our renderings. The Color Grading was done using MagicBullet LOOKS and of course some Sapphire effects were added as well.

The sound was done by a different company based on our mood music and some suggestions we made. I think the movie was real success and Audi intimated to be more than happy with the result here. So thank’s to the team.

The E-tron will be featured at IAA 09. We produced a 360 turn of the car and a movie that will be available soon. Check out the website here

Check out the Audi Website for the full movie here

The A5 Webspecial was as mentioned a combination of Real Images, used to create the background layers, stock material for some FX work, and of course fullCG renderings. This time we even organised a greenscreen shooting to place an actor in the all computer generatet end scene. The car was as always rendered in Maya using mental ray and the compositing was done in Fusion, and some shots in Nuke. The final Film was edited in AfterEffects.

Once again check out the result on the Audi website.

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