To help launch new network FOX Sports 1, director Joseph Kahn created ‘Happy Days’ – a journey across football, NASCAR, baseball and other sports. Stadium and arena crowds were generated by a52 using a custom Massive pipeline.
During filming, a52 carried out some extensive on-set data acquisition – from locations in five cities shot over 10 days. “We took multiple HDR’s at each location, laser distance and survey information to help with tracking and geometry placement in 3D, and plotted camera positions on field to match angles for stadium replacements,” says CG supervisor Kirk Shintani. “We took reference photos of everything as well. All of this was sent back to the office every day so the team was able to keep moving forward while the shoot was ongoing.”
The crowd generation began with considering reference from existing footage. “We watched several clips of Raven’s games, USC football, NASCAR races and all the events covered in this spot,” recalls TD Chris Janney. “Kirk and I spent hours going over reference photos of fans, making a list of all sorts of apparel and props fans brought to the games. You’ll see everything from checkered flags in the NASCAR shots, to foam fingers in NFL and baseball. There are over 1,500 textures for hats, hair, parkas, ponchos, sunglasses, shorts, pants, tank tops, and maybe a beer helmet or two. We looked for what made these events fun for fans and tried to cover all the bases…pun intended.”
a52 set up a Massive–Maya–V-Ray pipeline that took the tracked plates, placed planes where seating existed and then curves with points for every seat. “This was exported to Massive as terrain (the planes) and placement (the curves) with the number of agents per curve based on the number of points on that curve,” says Janney. “The agent assignment and weighting was also done in this process, so we were writing out a Massive .mas file from Maya with agent groups, placement and percentages.”
“Now in Massive,” continues Janney, “we would check for bad locators, (fallen off the terrain, overlapping, reversed orientation, etc) as well as adding some noise and randomness to their location. Finally, we would create our sim layers, and command-line sim all the crowds, whose final outcome was a VRay .vrscene file.”
For lighting, artists created a tool enabling a lighter to browse to the latest version of the Massive .vrscene file. “Based on frame offset, etc. we would be rendering out the Massive crowds from Maya, then submitting them to Deadline for rendering on our render farm,” says Janney. “We created some great tools which really cut down on not only the time to move shots down the line, but really reducing the time needed to train people on using these tools.”
Shintani suggests that what made the crowds convincing was “the attention to detail in creating textures and props for them as well as tying the reaction of the AI crowds to the action of the plates. Each event has its own set of props. Each event has its own crowd. There was no ‘one size fits all’ for us on this spot.”
Lots of rumors and speculation. Zero confirmation.
