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Honda "Endless road"


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As I am sure you all like challenges, have a look at this latest project we just finished at Glassworks, our first crack at Houdini which was used extensively for all the planning and layout as well as blueprint generation and more...

 

http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/ad-day-honda-just-keeps-driving-hypnotic-looping-ad-never-ends-163919#

 

Enjoy.

 

PS. BTW, it is a real miniature so try to figure out how could you shoot that and plan for it, it get's deeper and deeper to the point of breaking point for your brain.

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We have been joking all the way through that ultimately many people will simply enjoy it but never will question the illusion in front of them which is a shame because it is a game I crave to play with the audience.

 

Let's see..

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I'm no vfx wizard, but here is what occurred to me.

The design of the shot had to be carefully planned not to show a long shot car and road at the same time as close up or it would spoil the illusion (somewhat).  Same goes for trees and rocks. The scale of textures and objects has to look right no matter where one pauses.  This alone was a big challenge.

Another problem was matching the in/out camera pass. At first, I thought this would be a long dissolve, but the more I watched, I think it is done with a couple wipes.

Since everthing moves left to right there are probably a couple wipes in there so one can comp in the earlier part of a pass (left) with a later part of a pass (right). A tree and a rock provide these two perfect edges.

In the upper right corner there is a jump cut rock as one pass cuts to another. The camera move, speed, focal etc. all have to be scaled perfectly for any of this to join up.

Given your comments - I suspect there is a ton more tricks to it than I'm imagining.

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No wipes, no tricks other than your brain adjusting as you go along, which is the thing that took quite a bit to crack.

 

Your point about the "empty space problem" you describe at first and most importantly "two worlds in the same world problem" were indeed crafted endlessly so it is not about wipes but more about appearing in the right exact frame in which scale is being sold to the audience.

 

Camera speed, focal etc respond to a mathematical equation which is a logarithmic spiral so these were untouchable and all had to worked out without touching those.

 

A good pointer for the next step is the layout had to be done in space AND time so we were basically looking at two moments in time, two different scales plus the construction scale at the same time and that was slow of course.

 

Plus you can't render 1/1000 of the scene!!! the teapot in a stadium conundrum is here multiplied on every iteration and we had developed 4 worlds to be able to see the effect further down the line.

 

Good one though!! I know in this forum you guys will get it.  ;-)

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Redshift is proving useful eh?  It does seem strange as GPUs have all sort of bottlenecks; when you dig into the technical side of GPUs you find that the problems with scheduling warps, weak shader cores, latency etc.

 

My current theory is that most CPU renderers don't use all the instruction set features of the latest CPUs and they are laden with old code, whilst GPUs are all new code.

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Great work Jordi. So cool to see this at last! I hope you take a well deserved break.

 

Redshift is proving useful eh?

 

 

Redshift is just fast as hell. Sure, you will eventually hit limitations (may also find CPU renderer limitations removed) but it's just fine for many commercials studios who don't need programmable shaders and can easily fit most scenes into VRAM. My experience is that artists will be extremely reluctant to go back to using CPU renderers.

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Is Red Shift somehow associated to Autodesk?  I ask because I see it only works with Maya and Softimage and they´re announcing MAX...i.e. all Autodesk packages.

 

Redshift sells for those packages IMO:

 

1 the market size

2 the crappier renderer that ships with the product :)

 

 

Excellent! Watching now.

 

 My experience is that artists will be extremely reluctant to go back to using CPU renderers.

 

Out of interest, how many/what type of GPUs do the artists have in their machines, or do artists always have a GPU farm to check their work? Overall trying to get a sense of the people whom like GPUs renderers, and, so far it's the ones that have a few GPUs in their machine that always seem to like it the best.  Thanks!

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The big rocks on the "outside" the road/spiral had to be made identical or as closely as possible to the "inner" ones, then plot the camera movement so that the start will match exactly tthe end position in relation to each respective rock.

Great clip, grats!

Edited by McNistor
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Marty - Indeed the boxes for artists have a top GPU and then the render farm pool has their own GPUs.

 

McNistor - We were very careful on the transition point which is NOT a wipe but rather a line where things need to match 100% or it won't work, that was very tricky because there are cost implications so for example building 10:1 rocks is more expensive than 1:1 and therefore we did use a pre-roll and take advantage of these scale issue to make it cheaper. The same with plants, etc... The more you think about it the more you are going to have quite a journey.

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Cool work!!!,reminds me this

 

 

 

Fwiw -- this 'golden ratio' doesn't appear in nature anywhere. Approximately, yes, but not to the accuracy that the popular press likes to make it out to be.

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