Summary
Dow 'Quiet Train' Will Stop You in Your Tracks
Have you ever been on a crowded train and felt like people were
sitting on top of you? In Dow's 'Train', Draft FCB and Director
Nicolai Fuglsig treat that turn of phrase literally. Together with
The Mill NY, they created a train made entirely of people!
Creating a "people train" is no easy feat. With more than 20
shots calling for CG effects, the team had to come up with a
creative way to accomplish this task. VFX Supervisor/3D Lead
Jeffrey Dates explains, "Crowd FX are traditionally done with
Massive software. However, for this project we used
Softimage's ICE for the crowd system because of the team's
experience with the it and the rendering software, Mental Ray.
"We created 26 unique CG 'actors' who were then modeled, rigged,
textured, shaded and animated," Dates continues. "The textures
were acquired on set, and then utilized in the CG
library. The animation was comprised of a series of
ambient actions that could be called upon depending on our
needs."
The crowd setup was created in Softimage's ICE with user control
in mind. Using this software made it easy to place the actors and
select which ones would sit, stand, wave, squat, check their
watches or any other action the team designated.
Because some shots had upwards of 12 cars and 7,200 CG actors,
Dates and his team needed to find an efficient way to render the
largely populated shots. "In order to optimize render time, we used
Mental Ray proxy stand-ins, which 'baked' out each of the CG actors
ahead of time," Dates says. "This offloaded a lot of the
computing time needed during the 'translate' process. With
stand-ins, we were seeing render-times down from 50 minutes to 5
minutes per frame!" The stand-ins were then applied to the shot
with all the controls, allowing for fast feedback for the
user.
The lighting was handled traditionally, using Mental Ray with
Final Gathering. The reduction in render time allowed the team
to re-render iterations and tweak animation and lighting at will,
and also gave the team more time to spend on perfecting the details
and nuances that bring this 'Train' to life.
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