3D Animation: Make Some Noise!

PROJECT: MAKE SOME NOISE Giants stadium scoreboard prompt used during Giants home games at MetLife Stadium on the 4 large video boards.

One of Ferro's contractual responsibilities during the NFL season is to support the Giants in game show . This includes videos and graphics played during time outs throughout the game. Some of those graphics include stadium prompts. These are used to motivate or direct the crowd to an action. This particularprompt was to have the crowd cheer or Make Some Noise . The prompt was to be based on the older version prompt, which was a simulation of a group of audiometers increasing with the level of the crowd noise. A few other design considerations were the project's color scheme, which had to incorporate the blue and red of the Giants' team colors and the enormous size of the stadium's boards.

To ensure his design would scale the an enormous stadium screens of 28 ft. X 113ft. and accommodate the unique video formatting framing of those boards, Swen built a custom playback template in Cinema. Swen said his biggest concern was working at such a huge scale, When your working with a monitor that is 23 inches X 14 inches you have to constantly remember that a 2 text character on your desktop monitor will be 2 ft on the stadium boards. That's an insane ratio to be working in.

When I think of audio meters I always think of the meters on an audio sound board /mixing board (see BEHIND THE WIZARDS CURTAIN Note: 1)

Like the ones found in music recording studios or at concerts. States Ferro senior graphic designer and animator, Matt Swen Swensen. Swen started the project by researching different mixing consoles. He was looking for ones that had the coolest style and looked realistic . Swen ended up on the Turbo Squid site. There he found a model that he thought would work. While working on the design one of Ferro's audio engineers saw his project file and mentioned that the model he chose was not a realistic console used in a stadium audio suite. Swen sarcastically asked himself, Is it of value to have a diverse group of experts around all the time or is it a curse, because I'm sure the client would have never noticed? In the world of Ferro Production, Right is always right even if no one will ever notice.

Swen finally landed on realistic console that had the perfect look and coincidentally the same color scheme as the Giants. Fortunately, the image was also a high-resolution large-scale overhead view, perfect for modeling.

CONCEPT:

Swen's concept for the animation would have the faders on the console moving up while the bar graph VU meters would increase thereby simulating the crowd getting loud . To achieve an exciting animation he would simulate several different camera angles of the console and moving faders revealing the text GET LOUD .

My first attempt at molding and animating the faders was a bust , Swen admits. What I attempted to do was bring in the entire flat image into Cinema and then animate new faders over the ones from the original image. After my first test I realized that when the faders animated / moved from their original position, it relieved the static faders from the original image. The genius of a genius is knowing there are several ways to achieve your goal.

Swen continues, This was a trap I unintentionally set for myself. Usually, rushing through a project causes you to jump passed steps in your normal workflow, which always means more rework in the end. That was exactly the case with this attempt. After abandoning his initial approach and rethinking his attack plan, he nailed it.

RESTART

STEP ONE: Prepare console for animated faders

Knowing that in the final animation he wanted the channel faders (see BEHIND THE WIZARDS CURTAIN Note: 2) to be moving, Swen had to find a way to animate the faders over the still image of the console. Swen recalls, In order to move the faders the first thing I needed to do was separate them from the still model . To achieve this he imported the 2D console image into Photoshop and removed each fader. This left him with a flat image of the console with no channel faders.

STEP TWO: Flat image to 3D model

He then imported the new faderless console image into Cinema (this is the program used for 3D modeling) and transformed the 2D console into a 3D model. (For details on this process please refer to Swen design blog) http://www.ferroproductions.com/reel-ferro-open-breakdown/

STEP THREE: Adding animated faders

Animating the faders without running into the same problem I approached things a little differently Swen states. To replicate the faders he first had to make new faders. To do this he selected one fader from the original image, the one furthest to the left, and then applied the MoGraph > Cloner (see BEHIND THE WIZARDS CURTAIN Note: 3) to that fader. He tweaked the setting to CLONE (see BEHIND THE WIZARDS CURTAIN Note: 4) this one fader 11 times along the X axis (see BEHIND THE WIZARDS CURTAIN Note: 5). In doing this he knew he could now control the positioning of each fader in relation to the console's front panel and each adjacent fader. This would give him a perfect replication of the original image and still allow fader movement. He now had a perfect 3D model of the console with faders that he could determine their movement.

STEP FOUR: Camera angles and edits

From the beginning I knew they wanted a highly stylized final piece. Swen reveals. I knew I'd need several simulated camera angles timed with the movement of the console and meters. He set camera one positioned at the back of the console angled to reveal faders moving towards camera. The second camera set on the same plan as the faders looking up to the VU meters.

STEP FIVE: Animating the faders

There are several key stages of animating the faders

LINK:	http://www.ferroproductions.com/3d-animation-make-some-noise/...
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