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Reader SurveyOvercoming CAD
Sep 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
A broadcast promo for MLB's 2005 All-Star Game places several big-name baseball players inside a CG pinball machine, where they pitch, hit, and catch steel balls.
Blind taped stand-ins for real players against a greenscreen with a MiniDV camera, then used After Effects to composite that imagery with CG built in 3ds Max.
Chris Do, president and creative director at Santa Monica, Calif.-based Blind, says the search for references led to famed pinball designer John Trudeau, who submitted a digital blueprint of a pinball machine — down to the last screw and spring — as a gigantic, IGES CAD file. Blind imported the file into Autodesk 3ds Max. “But the geometry was so heavy, it took about five minutes to open it each time,” Do says. “We had to have our lead 3D artist, Lawrence Wyatt, rebuild the entire blueprint in 3ds Max [v. 6]. That gave us a template we could follow.”
While inserting footage of the players into the CG environment, the foremost issue was the need for extensive light effects. “Pinball tables are composed of a multitude of tiny lights and a variety of materials that are reflective, transparent, and luminescent,” Do explains. “The DPs did a great job of collaborating with us to capture reactive lighting in-camera. Because of this, we were committed to a particular lighting setup that the CG environment needed to match. In the end, the natural lighting shifts on the players made for a more convincing composite. We used After Effects and the [GenArts] Sapphire plug-ins extensively to create glints of light, along with [another plug-in, Red Giant Software's] Knoll Light Factory [v. 2].”
Blind relied on After Effects (v. 6.5) for most compositing and keying, Autodesk's Flame (v. 8.5) for cloning, and SplutterFish's Brazil (v. 1.2.58) ray tracer for rendering most shots, sometimes in combination with the 3ds Max built-in ray tracer. Blind also used Composite Wizard from Red Giant Software to finesse mattes and blend live-action plates with the CG environment.
