At this Toronto facility, Autodesk® 3ds Max® software helps artists find ways to accomplish challenging digital effects.


By Audrey Doyle

We've all heard the saying "If there's a will, there's a way." At Red Rover, a Toronto facility that creates 3D animation and visual effects for film and television, the will is evident in the tenacity of the artists, who, when faced with a challenging effects problem; continue to experiment until they discover a method to solve that problem. The way they do that is with 3ds Max software.

"We've been using 3ds Max software for six years, and we use it almost exclusively for all our commercial projects," says Richard Rosenman, 3D animation director. "There isn't another piece of software that's been able to lure us away from 3ds Max, or has presented us with a toolset we can't get within 3ds Max software. With 3ds Max we can tackle anything that comes our way."

Most recently, the software helped the Red Rover artists to tackle a new 60-second theatrical commercial advertising Toyota's four-door Matrix wagon. Called "Cell Splitting" and developed by Saatchi & Saatchi Toronto, the commercial features photorealistic computer-generated Matrix vehicles that multiply and divide, in much the same way cells multiply and divide to maintain life.

According to Rosenman, from the outset "Cell Splitting" was an extremely challenging project. "Never before have we attempted an effect like this," he says. "Plus, although we were awarded the project four months before our deadline, the live action wasn't scheduled until the final month, so we had only four weeks of production time for this."

Despite the short deadline, the team made great use of their time and focused their attention during those first three months on previsualizing the spot, modeling the car, and researching ways in which to multiply and divide, or split, the car. Creating the previz was extremely helpful for the team, Rosenman notes. "It showed us, the client, and the live-action director, Sean Thonson, the direction we were heading in," he recalls. Plus, by studying the previz, Thonson got a better idea of the live elements he would need to shoot, and how he should shoot them, saving crucial time during that phase of the project.

"Creating previsualizations is a great strength of 3ds Max," Rosenman continues. "For the previz we used the software's scanline renderer, and it just plowed through everything. If we made a change to the previz, we could render it and have it back in 30 seconds. Thanks to this speed, we created a full previz of the entire spot in less than a week."

3ds Max software shone when building the 3D car as well, a task on which Red Rover's Ben Pilgrim spent more than a month, finessing the model until it looked perfect. "Because this was for theatrical release, we needed every little detail," Rosenman recalls.

Unfortunately, Pilgrim didn't have actual CAD data to use as reference because Toyota doesn't disclose such information. So instead, he and Rosenman went to a local Toyota dealership and took pictures of a Matrix in the showroom from every possible angle and perspective.

From these photos, Pilgrim modeled a CGI car that is indistinguishable from the real thing. One of the features within 3ds Max software that he found to be especially helpful was Editable Poly. "It was really quick for manipulating the proper shapes, getting them into the exact position that I wanted, and subdividing the surface of the car where I needed to," Pilgrim says. "I like to be able to select the rings and loops and be able to subdivide based on those, and just get a real handle on the mesh, which 3ds Max lets me do."

Although 3ds Max software was helpful for creating the previz and the 3D car, it was crucial for creating the splitting effect. "When we first got this project we had no idea how we were going to do this," says Rosenman. "Usually we like to go into a job having an idea of how we're going to accomplish it. With this job we had no clue."

So, the team quickly got to work. First they explored the idea of using particles, building the particle systems using the ParticleFlow feature in 3ds Max. "ParticleFlow is an amazing plug-in," Rosenman enthuses. "It gives you absolute control over every particle and their interactions." However, the agency decided they'd rather see something closer to a lava lamp effect, so the team went back to the drawing board.

After some perseverance, they discovered one of the keys that would make the effect a success-nestled within the 3ds Max Modifier list. According to Rosenman, the team worked their way through every modifier in the list to see if any of them could pull off anything that was remotely close to what was required. When they reached the Symmetry modifier they hit pay dirt. "That's where we nailed it," he says. "None of us had explored it much, but when we tested it, we saw it would be perfect for the job."

As Rosenman explains, the Symmetry modifier makes an exact symmetrical copy of a model's 3D mesh. "When you put a Symmetry modifier on any object, it gives you an axis plane. When you move that axis plane, it makes a symmetrical version of that object on the opposite side of the plane, and it welds the two edges together," he says. "So, for this project, when we put a Symmetry modifier on the car model's 3D mesh and then grabbed that axis plane, wherever we shifted the plane it copied the mesh on the other side."

Once they solved the problem of how to split the 3D mesh in two, they had to figure out how to modify the seams between the copies so that they resembled blobs of "lava" in a lava lamp. "When we created the symmetrical objects, the welded vertices between them were very harsh," Rosenman explains. To solve this problem the team used the Volume Select modifier at the seams with a soft selection enabled, then added a Relax modifier to relax and effectively smooth out the selected vertices at the seams, producing a nicely blended symmetrical object.

They used additional modifiers as well, primarily for tweaking. For instance, at one point the agency wanted the objects to show more resistance when splitting, like one piece of bubble gum being stretched and exhibiting tension before being split in two. To create that effect, the artists used the FFD (Freeform Deformation) modifier.

Although Rosenman says the Symmetry modifier was effective at producing something similar to what the team wanted, the fact that it created symmetrical cars meant that, when animated, if one car turned to the right, its symmetrical counterpart would turn to the left. "But in the commercial, each vehicle had to perform a specific action and drive in a particular direction," he says. To resolve this problem, the team used model swaps. "Once the vehicles split, the symmetrical vehicle was hidden and replaced with two independent vehicles exactly where the respective cars should be at that current frame," Rosenman explains. "This allowed us to animate each car independently."

Rosenman adds that initially he and the team were somewhat worried that, although the effect worked on a low-res version of the mesh, it would come to its knees when they tried it on the final model, which was far more complicated. "But that didn't happen," he states. "It handled our high-res model, which was hundreds of thousands of polygons, perfectly."

In addition to the CGI car and the splitting effect, the team also used 3ds Max to create an android version of the head of the actress driving the live-action car in the spot, and to create 3D virtual sets for all the CGI shots. For instance, for the scene in which a car splits while driving down the street in the club district, the artists rebuilt the street in 3D, using for texture maps various photos taken during the live-action shoot. Then they placed lights in approximately similar locations within the sets, with each light mimicking its real counterpart in intensity, color, and falloff, and they built self-illuminated spheres and placed them at each light location to act as reflection highlights for the cars. For lighting and rendering the final shots, the team used Chaos Group's V-Ray plug-in for 3ds Max.

One of the final steps in this project concerned compositing, and for this task, the Red Rover team relied heavily on Autodesk® Combustion®. In addition, they used Combustion software for sign removal, heavy color correction, and environment embellishment.

Combustion software also helped with motion blur. "Whenever you have an object whose vertices are being reassigned and changed with every frame, as was the case with this project, you're destroying the ability of your renderer to perform motion blur," Rosenman says. "But by using radial zoom blurs, directional blurs, and other post tricks in Combustion, we were able to get motion blur to work as a post effect."

According to Rosenman, "Cell Splitting" is headed toward the small screen, as a 30-second version for television release is expected to hit the airwaves soon. "This was a really high-profile project for us, and it's not something I would have wanted to take our chances on by using any other software," he says.

"It was like nothing we'd ever done before," he concludes. "And although we came across some challenges during this project, we were able to find a way to handle all of them in 3ds Max."