Cosmocyte Turns to CINEMA 4D for “World’s Toughest Fixes”

MAXON’s MoGraph module used to create impressive field of reflective mirrors.

National Geographic Channel’s “World’s Toughest Fixes” was headed into its second season when the creators decided to find a company they could trust to make the show’s animations rather than doing them in-house, as they had the previous year. The animations, which usually depict some of the most complicated aspects of repairing something out of the ordinary and often under tricky or dangerous circumstances, have a very distinct style (closely resembling blueprints). So they were looking for artists with specialized skills. Enter Cosmocyte.

Cameron Slayden, founder and creative director of the Savage, Maryland-based medical and scientific animation house, and his team had already worked on “National Geographic Explorer” when this opportunity arose. “They already knew we could produce good results and they gave us a chance,” Slayden explains. He added that, while the first season’s 3D animations had been done in After Effects, Cosmocyte used MAXON’s CINEMA 4D in their own work. “I specifically selected my team for their creative ability and science focus,” he says. “And one of the best things about CINEMA 4D is that it has such an easy learning curve. I can bring people on even if they don’t know [CINEMA 4D] because it will only be a few weeks before everything falls into place for them.” (See Cosmocyte’s reel at: www.cosmocyte.com/demo.swf).

Once they had the style nailed, Cosmocyte’s goal was to keep the animations, many of which couldn’t be illustrated without using 3D, visually interesting while explaining what was happening in ways that were clear and understandable to viewers. Creative was based on a rough cut and voiceover script delivered beforehand by the client. Sometimes they would also receive CAD files but artists usually had to make everything from scratch. “It was nice when we got the CAD files because by using Okino’s PolyTrans we were able to easily convert the files over for use in CINEMA 4D,” Slayden says.

One of the best examples of Cosmocyte’s work on this project can be seen in the episode about the building of a solar power plant in Lancaster, California (watch the clip here: channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/worlds-toughest-fixes#tab-Videos/06901_00). In the episode, crews confront the daunting task of suspending two boilers, each weighing 65 tons, from two towers 160 feet above a field of mirrors. Once programmed, the mirrors are designed to reflect the sun’s rays back to the boilers that in turn will create enormous amounts of steam.

“Using MoGraph, we placed all 20,000 mirrors onto a disc that had a slight parabolic shape,” Slayden explains. “Then we used Inheritance Effectors to take the mirrors (which appear to be falling into place) down to the level of the field.” MoGraph’s Target Effector helped ensure that the parabolic orientation of the mirrors was maintained as each one took its spot on the ground. “We were trying to show how the two principles at work are identical between the parabolic disc and the much larger field of mirrors,” Slayden says.

One of the most challenging aspects of this project, Slayden says, was its strict style. On the upside, it was good to have a consistent look and know how to achieve it. The downside, though, was having to make everything look and act as it should within a limited palette (mostly shades of blue) using a small pool of assets. “Normally,” Slayden explains, “you would use a lot of texturing to define objects. In this case, we could only use geometry so everything had a real engineering kind of blueprint feel to it.” To do this, artists primarily relied on CINEMA 4D’s Sketch and Toon module and cel renderer.

After they developed their optimization procedures, the final high-definition render for most of the 15-second animations took about two to three hours using CINEMA 4D’s NET Render module. To help the process run smoothly, projects were cut up into different passes and rendered at the same time. “Any one of those passes would be about 1.5 Gigabytes,” says Slayden, who is pleased with the ease with which CINEMA 4D was integrated into their creative pipeline. “CINEMA 4D is so much of our focus now that we look for other programs based on how well they can work with it, not the other way around.”

Several back-to-back animations from various episodes:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lax0crWz-M