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Part 2

First of all the RB4, Red Bull’s racer had to be brought into C4D. Fortunately Red Bull provided the original CAD data. The car was converted to polygons using McNeel Rhinoceros in different resolutions after some missing parts had been remodelled with NURBS. One low resolution version for long shots, a medium resolution version and a high detailed mesh for closeups. These were imported to Cinema 4D via the Wavefront .obj format to retain the NURBS normal information and guarantee a flawless shading. Then the geometry was rigged using some complex Xpresso expressions to get sort of a digital car asset that could be used by different artists at different times of the project. Because of C4D’s XRef technology it was possible to switch easily between the resolutions for different tasks (animating, scene setup, final rendering, etc.) and shot types without having to replace the car manually.

In the meantime about 120 characteristic buildings in Singapore were modelled by hand with subdivision surfaces and arranged to form Singapore's city centre. Using commercially available models was not an option as the visual style was not only built upon metallic surfaces but also models which looked as if they had been made from steel plate by hand. A lot of effort went into the design of every single house. A problem here was the thickness of the steel plate. In distant shots it had to be adjusted to always look "just right". To create a resolution independent thickness property we abused C4D’s "Cloth NURBS" and its thickness feature. This way the procedural nature of C4D’s architecture solved the problem for us.




Because of its complexity in the details, building the racetrack with all its surroundings as one big model was not an option. Building it shot-wise would have meant starting from scratch with every single scene, though. As this was not possible due to the short time frame we decided to build a procedural "racetrack construction kit". First the track itself and all the assets needed were created as single pieces.

The models and textures then were rigged in C4D to create an automated setup file using MoGraph and proprietary plugins. This made it possible to basically reuse the track in the different shots with only slight modifications.

While all the assets necessary for the film were in the making, Peter Clausen, the director, and the animation team worked on the film itself. After creating a rough storyboard visualizing the basic ideas about framing and storytelling, the work on the animatic started. For every shot different animations were made and evaluated, leading to a rough edit. This was further refined several times. After this process a final version of the film was ready that served as reference throughout the production process.