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MillimeterDigital Collision
Feb 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Michael Mallory
Two cars collide at high speed, but at the moment of impact, they morph into thousands of airborne pieces. Each tiny fragment halts in midair, then falls rhythmically back to the ground to assemble into a new Lexus SUV hybrid vehicle. Digital Domain (DD) created this complex crash effect, under supervision from visual effects supervisor Eric Barba.
“[CG supervisor] Jay Barton and I both went to [Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif.] to be car designers,” Barba says. “We both know cars inside out, and that helped us figure out how we were going to break the cars up and get the pieces and orientations right. That was invaluable since the second car [in the spot] was designed entirely inhouse with a CG body over the live wheels and tires.”
DD artists used a combination of LightWave (v. 8.3) and 3ds Max (v. 7) for the CG and DD's Nuke package for compositing. The VRay renderer inside 3ds Max was crucial to increasing efficiency, according to Barton.
“The normal compositing challenge when we have lots of layers is taking each little thing and making it work with everything else in the same scene,” Barton says. “We get that for free in the [Vray] renderer, which simulates a lot of the true physics that we would normally have to fake in compositing. We rendered most of this stuff in few passes, so the compositing was all about taking what we had, which already looked great, and increasing the look on an artistic level.”
