Singapore Formula 1 Grand Prix

The Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix took place on September 28, 2008 on a street circuit in the city of Singapore.

Red Bull commissioned Peter Clausen Film & TV (Munich, Germany) to create a film clip showcasing the track, supplying all the relevant circuit information and a preview of the first night race ever to be held in Formula 1 history - and the first street race in Asia. The basic idea was to let F1 pilots Sebastian Vettel (Scuderia Toro Rosso) and Mark Webber (Red Bull Racing) deliver an action-packed head-to-head race on the new city circuit.

Peter Clausen Film & TV chose AixSponza Animation and VFX (Munich, Germany) as production partners for this film, which was done entirely in 3D.

Since the construction of the actual circuit was not yet complete, shooting on film was not an option. Above all, making a computer-generated film made it possible to use new and otherwise impossible camera angles, and to create a distinct and extraordinary visual style. The concept evolved to one that showed a photorealistic racing car driving through a stylized environment. This way the film's concept was brought across to the viewer without loosing the race feeling that is vital to Formula 1. AixSponza developed a stylized metallic world that is easily recognizable and abstract at the same time.

After the layout had been completed, two months were left to complete the entire project. A team of nine 3D and composite artists worked full-time on the project. The entire project was realized on Apple 8-core Xeon workstations using CINEMA 4D, Vray, After Effects and Nuke.

"The creation of about 2.5 minutes of completely computer-generated film in full HD resolution within two months posed a bit of a challenge to us. Especially the need for photorealistic imagery of the car and the huge amount of blurry reflections in the metal world were demanding", says Manuel Casasola Merkle, creative and managing director of AixSponza. "We had to think carefully about our software tools. Our decision to use CINEMA 4D and Vray was exactly right."

First of all, the RB4, Red Bull's racer, had to be brought into CINEMA 4D. Fortunately, Red Bull provided the vehicle's original CAD data. The car was converted to polygons using McNeel Rhinoceros to different resolutions (to do so, some missing parts had to be remodeled using NURBS): One low-resolution model for long shots, a medium resolution model and a highly detailed mesh for close-ups. These models were imported to CINEMA 4D via the Wavefront .obj format, which allowed the NURBS normal information to be retained and guaranteed flawless shading. The geometry was then rigged using some complex XPresso expressions to get a type of digital car asset that could be used by different artists at different times during the project. Because of CINEMA 4D's XRef technology it was possible to switch easily between the resolutions for different tasks (animating, scene setup, final rendering, etc.) and shot types without having to replace the car manually.

In the meantime about 120 buildings characteristic of Singapore were modeled by hand with subdivision surfaces and arranged to form Singapore's city center. Using commercially available models was not an option since the visual style was not only built upon metallic surfaces but also models that looked as if they had been made from steel plate. A lot of effort went into the design of every single house. A problem here was the thickness of the steel plate. In distant shots it had to be adjusted to always look acceptable. To create a resolution-independent thickness property CINEMA 4D's Cloth NURBS and its thickness feature were used extensively. This way the procedural nature of CINEMA 4D's architecture solved the problem for us.

Because of its complexity, building the racetrack with all of its surroundings as a single, and quite large, model was not an option. However, building it shot-by-shot would have meant starting from scratch with every single scene. As this was not possible due to the tight schedule it was decided upon to build a procedural "racetrack construction kit". First, the track itself and all the assets needed were created as single objects. The models and textures then were rigged in CINEMA 4D to create an automated setup file using MoGraph and proprietary plug-ins. This made it possible to basically reuse the track in the different shots with only slight modifications.

While all the assets necessary for the film were in the making, Director Peter Clausen and the animation team worked on the film itself. After creating a rough storyboard that visualized the basic ideas about framing and storytelling, the work on the animatics started. Different animations were made and evaluated For each shot, which resulted in a rough edit. This was further refined several times. After this process, a final version of the film was ready that served as reference throughout the production process.

One big concern of this project was the rendering. A lot of different effects had to be handled by the render engine. To start off, there were high poly counts because of the huge scenes and the CAD data involved. As the style is based on reflections, the engine had to handle very large amounts of raytracing. Global Illumination was used throughout the film to achieve the best lighting results possible. Last but not least the night look of the city required a large number of volumetric effects.

"Fortunately CINEMA 4D provides a lot of freedom as far as the render engine is concerned," Manuel Casasola Merkle states further. "In addition to the very fast and stable Advanced Render module there are many 3rd-party solutions available. Foremost there is Vray, one of the most capable raytracers out there. The good thing is that these two [complement] each other. Vray is capable of doing very good and reliable animated GI (Global Illumination) and produces highly photorealistic results because of its advanced BRDF material system in short amounts of time. AR on the other hand can do volumetric effects and AO (Ambient Occlusion) very good and quick."

Soon after the evaluation process started it became obvious that the best approach to rendering our project was a combination of Vray and Advanced Render. Vray handles large amounts of raytracing flawlessly and with its light cache mode, implements a very stable and versatile global illumination engine. Advanced Render on the other hand provides great volumetric rendering and fast ambient occlusion. Using both complementarily was no problem because of the excellent integration of Vray into CINEMA 4D. As the 64-bit versions of both packages were used, even the large poly counts were no real problem, as all of the render nodes had enough physical RAM. To render the motion blur on the wheels a custom plug-in solution based on Advanced Render was used.

To simplify the process of generating global illumination, the shots were first split into Multi-Passes. The background was rendered in Vray using a baked light cache. This way only one GI pass had to be rendered and could then be distributed to the farm. The track and the car had to be rendered using a GI method capable of moving objects, though. In most shots, directly rendering these with a smoothed light cache generated for every single frame worked well. As this smoothed light cache resulted in a lack of shadow detail, ambient occlusion passes from Advanced Render were used to bring this detail back in the final composite. In some difficult backlight situations this method did not work, as flickering of the GI was visible. Here we used Vray's brute force mode in combination with light cache as a secondary engine. This resulted in longer render times but consistently generated the results needed.

All the render layers were finally combined using Adobe After Effects. The possibility of easily bringing in the 3D cameras and objects' positions directly from CINEMA 4D came in very handy. This way final touches to the volumetrics, lensflares and textures were easy. The motion blur was done in After Effects, also using Advanced Render motion vector passes.

CREDITS

Title
Vettel & Webber in Singapore - "Let's do a lap"

Client
Red Bull Media House GmbH

Production Company
Peter Clausen Film & TV Produktionsgesellschaft mbH, Munich
www.peterclausen.de

Director / Producer
Peter Clausen

Line Producer
Cecilia Trück

Animation Studio
AixSponza, Tietz Tyroller Casasola Merkle Müller GbR
www.aixsponza.com

CD / Design VFX Supervisor
Manuel Casasola Merkle

Editing / VFX Director
Christian Tyroller

Technical Director
Achim August Tietz

VFX Supervisor
Christian Stanzel

3D Lead Artist
Matthias Zabiegly

3D Operators
John Strieder  
Sven Mai  
Arpad Beres  
Matthias Popp  
Gianni Ciatola
Ingo Walde
Jan Haluszka
Christian Förg
Leonhard Akinbiyi

3D Juniors
Holger Aumüller
Tobias Szabo

Rigger
Fabian Rosenkranz

Animator
Philipp Strasser
Johnathan Ben Dor

Junior Compositor
Jan Glöckner

Production Manager
Anne Tyroller, Eva Kunze

Music
Andrej Melita
Peter Clausen