Rabbit Moves 45,000+ Tons In Less Than Three Months

The program kicked off with a simulated move of the 1,250-foot-high, 102-story, 365-ton Empire State Building in Manhattan, NY.

It took Tyler Rabbit 12 weeks consisting of 15-hour days and a total of about 1200 working hours to move more than 45,000 tons of buildings, monuments, ships and aircraft. He moved it all in 3D space using MAXON Computer's critically acclaimed CINEMA 4D software.

Rabbit, a professional 3D artist and accomplished computer animation generalist with hundreds of hours of broadcast, DVD and web creative visual content to his credit recently devoted three months of his life to creating highly illustrative, detailed and visually immersive 3D visualizations for The History Channel television network. The program Tyler worked on was a special, mammoth two-hour episode of THC's "Mega Movers" series, titled "Mega Movers: Moving the Impossible." This pilot episode of the series showcases Rabbit's fluid, artistic, precise and technically illustrative recreations and chronicles some of the most ambitious and monumental object relocation endeavors ever undertaken. Like many cable television programs, this episode is re-broadcast periodically and can be seen Tuesdays on The History Channel.

"...some of the animations were pretty complex," Rabbit acknowledges, "but the big hidden challenge was the render process because there was a lot of rendering and I wanted it to look absolutely perfect. I wouldn't accept a single rough edge, texture anomaly, or unexpected shimmer or vibration. C4D has a great render engine but many of the application's settings are set by default to render as quickly as possible...For example to make the Thames River [for the Great Eastern Steamship sequence] completely free of unwanted background shimmer, I had to learn about adjusting noise delta and detail attenuation settings. It's just a matter of finding the balance between quality and speed and researching how nearly every setting and decision can affect that balance; some in small ways, others in huge ways. This is true of any 3D app. Since I wanted the absolutely cleanest, most [beautiful] render possible, finding this balance sometimes took countless test renders and many re-renders."

Rabbit also solicited the services of expert C4D modelers, Jay Garcia and Jaclyn Delaune.

For the "Mega Movers: Moving the Impossible" episode Rabbit, basically a self-taught computer artist who matriculated from the Art Center College of Design (Los Angeles) with a B.F.A. in Illustration in 2000, completed about 15 minutes of animation which included 23 visualizations. Two of these sequences depicted moves that could conceivably take place, while another three depicted inventions for pivotal relocation procedures which were developed at critical times in world history. The remaining 18 re-creations chronicled actual moving exploits that were successfully executed in the past. The program kicked off with a simulated move of the 1,250-foot-high, 102-story, 365-ton Empire State Building in Manhattan, NY.

A CINEMA 4D upgrade during the production process also injected additional realism into the project.

"Jay and I both upgraded to the newest CINEMA 4D version midway through the project, and I was so blown away by the SKY plug-in that I went back and added SKY to several animations that had already been approved," Rabbit says.

Rabbit's body of work for this program, complemented by Garcia's highly detailed modeling, can be viewed as a QuickTime .mov-file here.

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