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MillimeterAncient Animation
Sep 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Near photoreal architecture and roads (top), along with detailed 3D blueprints of Ancient Rome (bottom), were painstakingly designed by Match Frame, San Antonio.
At Match Frame, San Antonio, senior animator Jeff Stoyer says Rome: Engineering an Empire, required the painstaking creation of 3D backgrounds for flyover shots of ancient Rome, in addition to a wide range of photoreal animated buildings, blueprints, and maps.
“We had to do most of those shots in 3D, not as 2D matte paintings, in order to get the kind of architectural detail [producers] wanted,” Stoyer says. “We got very good at flowing together 3D backgrounds made up of a mixture of elements to fill in places where we had little or no information about what the background really looked like. We did everything from photogrammetry to using pieces of other buildings to assemble new chunks of urban areas that could be textured in a 3D program. Most of the shots required tons of modeling, texturing, and environment creation. That was the toughest part of the job.”
Match Frame used Softimage XSI (v. 4.2) for 3D and much of the compositing. “XSI's compositor was used for most of the architectural shots, with the maps using a combination of XSI, [Adobe] After Effects, and a bit of Photoshop to help us assemble large map textures in 3D that were needed for us to do camera moves on,” Stoyer says.
