Sunday 22 Oct 2006 - 00:01
Rushes has assisted TBWA \ LONDON in the creation of a European campaign for PlayStation to support the brand’s mutli-million pound sponsorship of the Champions League, Rushes has revealed. Launching on the October 17, the series of 10-second idents will run across Europe for two months with the aim of re-affirming PlayStation as a leading Champions League partner and a brand that actively encourages people to get involved and take part, says the company.
The campaign consists of five idents, each showing a number of footballs formed entirely by people, which seek to engage and involve Champions League viewers. Each of the idents depict the movement of the football reacting to various situations including a free-kick, a goal, a ball hitting a post, a ball travelling through the rain and balls bouncing as if turned out from a kit bag.
Building the ball
Rushes were given the task of creating a representation of the official UEFA ball - made entirely of people. This 'people ball' was to undergo a number of realistic scenarios such as being shot into a goal or bouncing off a cross bar. To achieve this, two approaches were taken, says Rushes. First, a 3D ball was built using digital characters for wide shots and, second, a complex live-action rig was constructed to allow close-up photography.
The Rushes 3D set up was completed and used by Bob Hollow special effects as a template to build the live action rig. The finished rig could carry nine artists and stood 20-feet high and over 10-feet in diameter. The match between live action rig and 3D ball had to be very carefully considered in terms of textures, lighting, clothing and hair dynamics, since the ‘ball’ was to be seen in slow-motion and close-up to camera.
Other 3D solutions for the six films included a football net, with collision & rippling dynamics solution, 3D rain, seen in extreme slow-motion, colliding with and spinning through and off the human football.
The shoot was supervised by Jonathan Privett, Rushes head of 3D, Lars Holmgren, Rushes 3D supervisor on the project, and Martin Goodwin, Rushes senior VFX artist. Rushes created detailed animatics that provided a useful means for the director, DP and crew to assess the desired angles, animation speed, dynamics and other aesthetic needs during the shoot, says Rushes.
Hair net
As the ball is constantly flying at high speed, Rushes needed a solution to simulate the artists' hair for the animated ball. A 3D hair solution would have involved costly R&D time to get the hair behaving correctly, match hairstyles and the wind-blown aesthetic of the live-action. Rushes decided it was therefore best to create the hair as a textural solution - so the actor's and actresses were filmed against blue-screen, with wind machine, from front, back and profile to allow Rushes to extract accurate behaviour.
This footage was then stabilized / steady-tracked by Rushes VFX artist Alex Llewellyn and combined via Adobe Photoshop and Apple Shake to create animated texture-map sequences whilst providing an alpha channel to eliminate the area outside of the hair-limits. The textures were then mapped to 3D geometry. The geometry and UV-mapping had to be precise so as to keep the likeness to the actor's 'real' hair.
Cyflex’s plug-in for Maya was chosen to simulate the cloth behaviour of the live-action clothing. 3D animator Andrew Hargreaves studied the footage carefully so as to match the look and weight of the real clothing. He then modelled low-resolution polygonal clothes to match the wardrobe of the actors from the shoot, according to Rushes. These were then converted to Cyflex cloth shapes, and the attributes of each were tuned to reflect the properties of the fabric they represented. The attributes included weight, stiffness, friction and damping giving the relevant feel of denim or cotton.
Andy Hargreaves, Rushes animator, then set up a series of dynamic fields such as turbulence, wind and gravity in order to simulate the wind machines used on the shoot and the tumbling of the football which created a believable cloth movement.
Once happy with the simulation, these cloth shapes were baked; so that all the animation could be imported into the master scene without having to be re-simulated for every film.
Game of character
Lars Holmgren, Andy Hargreaves and Nathan Walster created the 12 3D characters to match the nine live-action characters with three extra characters, not present on the rig, to complete the football. Lars then rigged the 3D characters so that life-like movement could be created for each character, with hands pulling, gripping tight, feet and toes curling, back arching, heads turning, and more. The team then picked 'hero' characters relative to the camera's position and added more emphasis to certain movements to enhance the reality of each shot.
Pixar’s Renderman was then used to create the necessary highly detailed shaders, with several passes rendered such as beauty, specularity, displacement and shadows. Lars also sought to use Mental-Ray for certain passes such as 'soft-shadows' and occlusion, with atmospheric and volumetric lighting effects used to really tie the 3D in with the live-action.
Jonathan Privett used Maya's Wire tool and hand animation to create the soccer-net solution, whereby a (live-action) ball is kicked into the net resulting in the net wrapping around tight to the ball, sending ripples down its length. The camera-angle was such that great detail was necessary in terms of texturing and life-like dynamics of the ball collision and ripple effect.
Lars worked closely with Martin Goodwin who did all the final compositing in Flame making sure the movement, spin and positioning of each ball worked seamlessly with the live action. In addition, the surrounding environment was created using digital stills, which had dust particles and light atmosphere added to bring the scene to life. Another major part of the live action was taking out the rig; this was undertaken by Richie White (senior VFX Artist) in Flame. Both the beauty & green screen passes had to be de-rigged and then the illusion completed by the tracking in of body parts.
Matthew Bath
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