Dealing with changes and from the distance : that was one big concern, but we established from the beginning a fluid communication with Fox Sports Design team, including cinesync sessions so we didn't really feel we were separated by a few thousand kilometers.

Except from language of course! and maybe struggling with the non-metric system in the pre-production stage, when dealing with the shooting organization, helped reminding us we were working for a US broadcasting channel. Creating a whole racetrack, including pit stop and crowds : everything had to be there, from parking lot with barbecue to grand stands full of people screaming, all packed with details.

That meant a huge amount of geometry; we dealt with this problem by creating various levels of details for elements depending on the distance to camera in each shot. The challenge was creating a realistic racetrack without being too specific, since the promo has to present as much 16 different races. We took elements from different raceways and designed some others so the whole feeling was definitely "Nascar"...

No ground:  From the beginning we knew the main problem we would have to face was giving a sense of weight to the cars without a visible ground. To soften the effect of "flying cars". We spent a long time finding the right balance between giving the transparent track some texture to help giving sense of speed without dirtying too much the picture. Other elements were added to give depth such as layers of smoke or rubber bits flying over the ground.



We also created a complex rig for car suspensions and direction as we knew we were going to see the undercarriage of the cars in detail in most of the shots. The rig involved rigid body simulations fine-tuned by keyframe animation to get specific moves. For the car geometry itself we used as a base a commercial model available on internet that we adapted and detailed so it fitted in our pipeline.