Gallery

Need For Speed Carbon

Need For Speed Carbon
EA Black Box
Rainmaker LP
Jason Toth: Visual Effects Supervisor. Chris Roff: Producer. Jazon Macza: 3D Lead. Tom McHattie: Compositor
Plug-in(s) Used: Knoll Light Factory Pro

Rainmaker Chooses Knoll Light Factory

for Best-Selling EA Racing Game

Rainmaker LP (www.rainmaker.com), headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, is an award-winning visual effects, 3D animation, and post production company with a 27 year history of technical excellence and outstanding service in feature films, television, games, and commercials. With the recent acquisition of Mainframe, Rainmaker is now the largest animation and visual effects company in Canada.

Rainmaker's Visual Effects Supervisor Jason Toth, Producer Chris Roff, 3D Lead Jason Macza, and Compositor Tom McHattie teamed up with EA Black Box in Vancouver, British Columbia, for Need for Speed "Carbon" the next version of the best-selling racing title scheduled to hit the streets in November 2006. Rainmaker also worked on the EA game, Need for Speed Most Wanted, released in 2005. Mataio Gardi, Development Director at EA Black Box, oversaw the technical pipeline development on the EA side and was the Sr. Producer for the green screen shoot.

Challenge

EA recruited Rainmaker to generate over 200 VFX shots for the storyline mix between the different levels of the game called FMV's or In Game Cinematics. This process involved live action characters being shot in front of a green screen and then integrating the live action characters into the CG game world.

Once the footage was brought in-house, Rainmaker artists tracked the live action footage, sent the 3D tracking info to EA so they could use it within their game engine to render out backgrounds for Rainmaker that would match the movement of the camera on the live action set. Rainmaker then cleaned up tracking markers, color keyed to make mattes, and heavily stylized the footage.

"Since this installment of Need For Speed would be based at night, Knoll Light Factory gave us the flexibility to stylize realistic lens flares to assist in the transition between CG game play and live action cinematic sequences called FMV's," said Jason Toth, Visual Effects Supervisor.

Solution

"With Knoll Light Factory, we were able to track the headlights on the CG car and parent that with the center of the flare. We then placed it in a matte of the character so that the light would pop on and off as the character walked by. Being able to select from the numerous presets got us started quickly. In the end we ended up creating our own unique flares based on some of our favorites. We used a few polyspreads, stripe, pillow, glowball, and fadedring, and used the generic panavision, and a nifty pink lens, as our starting point," said compositor Tom McHattie.

Results

"We used Knoll Light Factory primarily on the money shots. It was the icing on the cake for the director, David Footman. Using this handy tool we were able to take a beautiful shot to the next level. It certainly helped that we could rely on the new faster render feature to have the flexibility to be creative, yet continue to meet deadlines," added Toth.

About Need for Speed Carbon

Need for Speed Carbon delivers the next generation of adrenaline-filled street racing and challenges players to face the ultimate test of driving skill on treacherous canyon roads. Need for Speed Carbon will support Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system, PlayStation® 3 computer entertainment system, and Wii™ as well as the PlayStation® 2 computer entertainment system, Xbox® videogame system from Microsoft, Nintendo GameCube™, Nintendo DS™, Game Boy® Advance, PSP™ (PlayStation Portable) handheld entertainment system, PC, and mobile devices.