ThirdFrameStudios

Pig-Destroyer intro

Together with Pig-Destroyer studios, production studio behind incredibly popular Tine Strela movies, our team of 3d artists created a 3d graphics animated movie intro based on the world famous Universal Studios intro with rotating globe and animated text.
Using Cinema 4d the team managed to recreate Universal studios intro in just a few days. Volumetric effects, particles driven by light and NASA Earth photos created a fairly accurate rip-of of the original intro, but post process in Adobe After Effects and Apple Shake has given it the final touch.

The films is being distributed on-line only, so you probably won't see it in theaters near you.

The team behind Pig-Destroyer intro:
concept art – Pig-Destroyer team
music – stolen from Universal Studios (sorry guys, but this is non commercial spoof)
3d modeling – Sandi Dolšak, Andraž Logar
texturing, shading, texture baking – Andraž Logar
animation – Andraž Logar
particle setup, technical directing – Sandi Dolšak
lighting, compositing – Andraž Logar

How we did it?

Usually we start with storyboarding and sketching, but this time we were ripping off the original Universal studios theme, so we had the best storyboard available – the original theme. So, with this project, the first step was rhythm timeline setup, basically an overview of the whole length of the theme with written on paper remarks regarding what is happening and when. The most difficult part of the beginning stages was figuring out the way that original camera moves. We tried different methods of animating a camera, for example first we tried to manually animate it. Then we figured out it would be better if we try constraining camera to the target and then animate that. Didn't work. Then we tried combination of on path constraining the position of the camera and constraining the orientation of it to the target and animating both. No success. At the end, after 3 days of trying different methods we figured out we should animate the object and leave camera alone, at least at the beginning stages.

Of course, one would argue, what happened to the modeling, texturing, lighting? Well, yes, we did model everything in advanced before figuring out the animation. But to be honest, modeling was extremely simple, earth was a sphere, the sign was, well, a sign, but of course the shading and lighting part was quite challenging.
We had to figure out the way to light the scene with appropriate material behaveour. We combined: the textures (high res NASA shots) of the earth with separate soil, water map, elevation map (we used that for displacing the spheres) and separate cloud layer. Most of the textures went on the original sphere, but the cloud layer is on separate, a bit bigger sphere with transparency. And since we had 2 spheres just for representing earth we end up animating both of them, with a little bit of offset to get better feeling of the shot. The sign itself had ambient occlusion baked into the diffuse channel in order to shorten the render time. Besides that it had no textures at all, just 2 different kind of materials with shaders.

Lighting was a challenge. Looking at the original theme we figured out that apart from having to lit the scene so it looks good, we have to play with volumetric light effects. After a couple of hours playing with different settings we come to the conclusion that we would have to combine volumetric lights placed in the center of the earth and controlled by a mask (a small sphere with animated slice) and only visible through the soil part of the earth (basically a separate earth sphere with alpha channel), a separate bluish volumetric light for the glow feeling and, most importantly, light driven Thinking Particles (module in Cinema 4d) as volumetric spotlights with animated life expectancy and size.

Žiga Dolar, our long time parter when it comes to compositing, suggested afterwards that we would achieve a similar result, perhaps even better, with 3d volumetric effects done in post processing. That solution would be much cheaper, faster and with almost real time control, so I guess we will listen to his advice (more :) with the future projects.

Rendering was done on our small render farm: (x2 4.8 amd, 2x 3.0 amd and powebook g4), one frame took around 5 minutes to render (at PAL resolution). Compositing and postprocesing was used for colour correction, for adding motion blur (the scene was rendered with Vixol vector pass) and for adding some additional effects like film grain, blurring the specular and syncing with the original music. For compositing we used After Effects since we did not have anything extremely complicated to do.

About Pig-Destroyer

Pig-Destroyer studios is a team of highly motivated and talented young movie producers, directors and actors that created a legendaryon-line distributed only movie series – parody, based on a, also legendary, slovenian marathon swimmer Martin Strel, who is a multiple world record holder in marathon swimming (Yangtze River, 6300 km, Mississippi River,3885 km...). Pig-Destroyer studios team has been responsible for the incredible success of independent on- line distributed movies that have taken Slovenia by storm.

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