A Helping Hand in 3D
Where exactly do relief funds flow? MAXON CINEMA 4D was used to create a short film that wants to offer answers to this much-discussed question.
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Many countries offer monetary assistance in an effort to reduce suffering throughout the world. The Belgian government is also offering assistance. Here, as elsewhere, this type of assistance is criticized by some, which makes it important to visualize the urgency of monetary assistance. The images that are commonly shown are of a negative nature and are designed to arouse the viewer’s sympathy in an effort to douse their criticism.
The creative team at Labrats took a completely different approach and used live action and CINEMA 4D animations to successfully visualize a relief operation. Marijn Raeven and his team show which projects are already up and running, which doesn’t put the viewer on a guilt trip but gives the viewer a positive feeling for what has been and is being achieved.
First, the hands, which are the only live-action element in the film, were filmed in a studio. Then various scene elements were created in 3D. These models were then added to the scene as XRefs and combined with the live action footage. CINEMA 4D’s IRR (Interactive Render Region) function was used extensively in this process to position the hands one frame at a time and saved an enormous amount of production time.
Because the entire clip is a single take without cuts, XRefs were used extensively. Without XRefs the scene would have become far too complex and might have exceeded the computers’ RAM capacities. By loading objects as XRefs and then removing them from memory when no longer in use, memory problems never even became an issue.
The team at Labrats used CINEMA 4D’s Physical Renderer for the final render. The Physical Renderer proved to be invaluable: indirect illumination, motion blur and depth of field were all included in the render process. No additional editing was necessary, which greatly sped up workflow. Thanks to the Physical Renderer and a few optimization tricks it was possible to render a single 1080p frame in less than 30 minutes. This meant that the entire production could be rendered in-house and didn’t have to be farmed out.
Looking back on their work with CINEMA 4D, Marijn remarks, “An absolutely rock-solid application, which made it possible for us to concentrate 100% on the project itself. We didn’t have to worry about any frustrating technical limitations and were able to put ourentire effort into the creative aspects of this project.”
Website Marijn Raeven:
www.raeven.be