“The Render Tree was very important for this commercial,” Hearsum says. The X-ray look for both the cat and the car was accomplished with XSI’s Render Tree. “Once we got it into XSI, we applied the X-ray look to it.”
“The data showed all the innards of the car,” says Hearsum. To create the X-ray Mercedes, the artists imported into XSI actual design data for the car, which they received in VRML format from the automobile manufacturer. “We had a lot of footage of the real cat landing, so we studied it, and with input from Daniel Levi, the director, we came up with a hybrid piece of action composed of various takes that the director liked,” Hearsum recalls.
Softimage 3d 4.0 2002 license#
While the transition from live to CG required precise tracking, once the cat was entirely CG the artists were allowed to exercise a bit of creative license in terms of animating the cat’s mid-air twists and turns. Then they built the cat’s internal organs, muscles, and skeletal structure in XSI, using books for reference. To create the 3-D X-ray cat, meanwhile, the artists began with a Viewpoint model of a cat, imported it into XSI, and manipulated the points so that they mimicked the shape and size of the cat in the commercial. In order to ensure that the approximately 100-frame dissolve from live action to CG was precise, the Glassworks artists painstakingly tracked the motion of the real cat by hand.
This left a film-quality image that they then processed to interpolate the frames from 1000 to 2000 frames per second, thus slowing the motion of the cat even further.Īs the cat is falling, the footage moves seamlessly from live action to a 3-D computer-generated X-ray animation that highlights the feline’s skeleton, muscles, tendons, and internal organs.
Softimage 3d 4.0 2002 code#
Steele, along with programmers from Glassworks’ R&D department, wrote some code to filter artifacts from the frames. Glassworks shot the footage of the cat against green screen with the camera rigged to move around the cat as it fell. This, he says, allowed the artists to rotate and tilt the camera in one continuous shot. Bruce Steele, director of Visual Effects at Glassworks, adds that the Phantom 5, which uses high-speed video that stores frames in the camera’s RAM, can hold approximately 4 seconds of action. According to Hearsum, the team had to shoot footage of the cat falling at a very high rate of speed in order to capture the way its body moved as it fell.
Softimage 3d 4.0 2002 windows#
The commercial ends with a live-action/CG composite, as a photo-real CG cat saunters off screen, leaving the real Mercedes to take center stage.Ī leading post-production house based in London, Glassworks completed the approximately 30 seconds of 3-D animation for this commercial entirely in SOFTIMAGE|XSI, running on Windows 2000 PCs equipped with Nvidia’s Quadro DCC graphics cards.Īs Alastair Hearsum, head of 3-D at Glassworks, explains, the sequence begins with a real cat that was shot using a high-speed digital camera called the Phantom 5, from Photo-Sonics Inc. At this point the camera swings around the cat and tilts to show its body, including muscles and skeleton, from every angle. The scene then shifts to the Mercedes, also shown in X-ray form to highlight its own interior safety features. As the cat falls, its X-ray body turns upside down and twists in the air to correct itself, ultimately landing safely on its feet. The cat, which begins its descent as a live-action feline, dissolves into a CG cat shown in X-ray form. Titled “Cat”, the 40-second spot highlights the safety features of the Mercedes S-Class luxury automobile through the use of a slow-motion animation of a cat as it falls from an out-of-frame perch. But judging by a new car commercial coming out of Glassworks, perhaps the best way is with SOFTIMAGE|XSI. Glassworks Relies on XSI to Animate Cat for Mercedes
What’s more, no cats were harmed during the creation of this commercial. The creative team works faster and gets a better look using XSI. 2003: Glassworks uses SOFTIMAGE|XSI to drop a cat for the new Mercedes Benz 40-second spot.
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