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MINI CONVERTIBLE - X-ray specs and virtual sets in CINEMA 4DÒAlways OpenÓ - thatÕs the tag line for the MINI Convertible. And it was up to Effekt-Etage (www.effekt-etage.de), acting as consultant and supervisor, to come up with something special to match the tag line. Effekt-Etage led the entire post production (virtual sets, character animation, color correction, tracking, camera matching, retouching, ...)
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Video and sound are used to tell the story of two friends and their dog Spike who spend 24 hours in a MINI Convertible that is "always open." The charm of this story lies very much in the expert blending of film, sound and Flash sequences. All of this is controlled by the viewer via an interactive interface that lets you play with the dog - and check out the cool curves of the MINI, of course!
CINEMA 4D was used for a 30 second animated clip, as well as to build two virtual sets, and also took care of much of the pre-viz.
X-ray specs & character animation
In the X-RAY clip, the viewer gets to wear X-ray specs and night vision goggles at the same time. This gives you a great view of the MINI's structure as lines and you can marvel at the actors and Spike the dog walking around as skeletons.
The X-ray look was achieved using a shader and Fall OFF map to adjust the transparency of the surfaces depending on their angle to the camera - surfaces perpendicular to the camera view were made transparent by the map while surfaces parallel to the camera view were mixed additively with the background. Multiple passes were rendered to allow maximum flexibility later during compositing. The night vision goggles look was added in compositing using various effects such as grain, distortion and lines.
The skeletons were created and animated entirely in CINEMA 4D. Spike the dog's skeleton started off as a copy of one of the human skeletons which was then modified and rearranged to fit Spike. The only part of Spike's skeleton that had to be modeled from scratch was the skull!
The real set - a parking lot in California's San Diego - was recreated in CINEMA 4D and the camera was matched to the reference frames.
For the drive-in movie theatre clip (called "autokino"), a complete cinema screen was created in CINEMA 4D and integrated with movie clips in Combustion. Tracking points were created in the position of the cinema screen, and these points were then tracked in Combustion using Corner Pinning.
For this project CINEMA 4D once again proved its worth with rock-solid stability, unbeatable performance and fast, easy to use network rendering.
www.effekt-etage.de
Infos
Postproduction-/ On-set supervisor: Holger Schaal, Björn Kowalski (www.bjoernkowalski.de)
Compositing- / 3D Artist: Andreas Böttger
Character Animation: Torsten Räbiger
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