Lexus CG Dark Ride

For a sneak peak of the not-yet-released Lexus CT 200h, director James Brown created an interactive adventure called ‘Dark Ride’. With the help of visual effects from Speedshape, users take on the role of the accomplice to Lexus driver Tony and must get the secret car – unscathed – from the Nevada desert to Los Angeles. We talk to Speedshape vfx supe Connor Meechan about his studio’s CG car work.

10Jun/lexus/l1fxg: This project seems a little bit different than your typical CG car spots because of its interactive nature. How did you approach it?

Meechan: Speedshape is pretty experienced at doing interactive work. We’ve done a tremendous amount for the different car companies and other companies in Detroit. The scope of the project and the way they went about the interactivity was a great approach and very ingenious and creative, but we have done a lot of web work. It basically involved taking their creative ideas and putting them into our pipeline.


10Jun/lexus/l2fxg: What were some of the challenges of the interactive elements?

Meechan: Part of the interactivity involved placing you in the vehicle with Tony, the driver. We did a lot of research with the whole Stink Digital team, the Skinny NYC team and the DP Claudio Miranda to try and figure out what were going use to do this properly. We had to ask ourselves, ‘Are we going to stitch three cameras together or just use one camera with a wide-angle lens?’ Claudio had used this really wide-angle lens before, so we gave it a test and we thought it looked really great. But the challenge was to work out a way to undistort it to the point where you can physically be in a car and pan around inside that world that the 6mm lens created. Our comp supe did a great job using Nuke to undistort the image to split it up into 16 different strips, then re-projecting it onto geometry in Nuke and taking a secondary camera in Nuke and being able to pan around inside of that.

10Jun/lexus/l3fxg: What did they shoot the car plates with?

Meechan: It was shot using the RED Mysterium X camera. At the time, the camera wasn’t available for purchase yet. It’s a camera that they developed with a new sensor for low-light scenarios. The footage is beautiful, and they did a great job, but some of the challenges were shooting with shutter angles of 270 to 360 and wide open irises because it was pitch black. It gave a beautiful look to the film but also caused some tracking challenges on our part because the image gets blurred. Also, the scenes were mostly shot with available light. There’s a couple of scenes where they had some lighting rigs, but what they wanted to do was show a very realistic environment.


10Jun/lexus/l4fxg: I understand they shot with a different car and you tracked your digital Lexus in. What kind of tracking challenges did that present?

Meechan: Well, firstly they were all night shoots or at magic hour. Along with that came a number of challenges. One was that there was a camera car with a lot of gear on it that had to be painted out. Also, the tracking vehicle, a Toyota, was actually four inches bigger than the vehicle we had to put in there, the Lexus. We had to set up tracking markers that would work in multiple situations and not have to be stripped off and put back on in between takes, because there just wasn’t time. So what we developed was taking LED pucks and using those on the vehicle. During testing we noticed the puck would cause lens flare and the light was too bright, so we had to diffuse the light in such a way that it wouldn’t do that. So we took some styrofoam balls and cut them in half and adhered them to the actual lens of the LED puck. This was really great in a number of ways because it diffused the light perfectly for our needs and also gave a unidirectional tracker on the vehicle. If you were looking at the markers straight on, it worked great, but then when the marker turned sideways it actually had a surface that was sticking out that you could still lock onto with the tracking software.


Then when the vehicle was close-up the markers would get kind of blown out with exposure. They were also very big which doesn’t provide the tracking solver with good data to lock onto the vehicle. So our CG supe, Ilya Astrakhan, developed these black crosses out of electrical tape. The tape masked out the bright light but you’d still have a little cross in the middle to allow the trackers great reference points for the solvers to lock onto. Then the bright lights worked great but they were causing spill onto the ground because the LED that was diffused by the styrofoam ball was spilling light onto the ground. So Ilya came up with a solution to use the same black tape to tape off the bottom of the sphere and it eliminated all the spill, which saves a lot of money on the very back-end when you’re having to shoot clean plates and then paint out the spill. We also used some magnetic white cards with black shapes on them so it stuck to vehicle without scratching for when the car came into an interior scenario or was not so dimly lit.

10Jun/lexus/l5fxg: How did you go about modeling and animating the car?

Meechan: Lexus provided us with the data for the 3D car. We’ve been doing cars for a long time so we have a very strong pipeline for taking the nurbs data that they use to manufacture the vehicles and converting it to a more usable light-weight polygon model to use for animation and rendering. I hate to use the word ‘robust’, but we’ve had the pipeline established for six years now. On each of the different shots, we captured spherical HDR imagery and still plates as well to use for ambient lighting scenarios. Then we re-projected the actual plate into the scene so that the close-proximity reflections worked and were extremely accurate to what was happening as the tracking car drove through those environments. We built simple geometry to project those onto. We use 3ds Max and Vray as our render engine and we use Nuke for compositing. We did all the colour in Scratch and we finished in Flame. Because the tracking car was slightly bigger than the Lexus, the comp team did a great job of taking the tracking vehicle out of the plate and once we got to the point where the plates were clean, then we just put our renders over the top.


Check out Dark Ride here

Check out the Dark Ride trailer here

Credits

Agency: Skinny, New York
Creative directors: Jonas Hallberg, Liron Reznik
Agency Executive Producer: Jen Dennis
Digital Production: Stink Digital, London; New York; Skunk, New York
Director: James Brown
Producer: Aris Mcgarry
Cinematographer: Claudio Miranda
Executive Producers: Daniel Bergmann, Robert Herman, Mark Pytlik, Stefan Dufgran,
Creative Technologist: Marcel Kornblum
Interactive Producer: Adam Mcnichol
Lead Developer: Ian Mcgregor,
Key Developers: Jamie Copeland, Matt Sweetman, Benoit Vinay, Javier Abanses, Zenon Olenski
Art Direction: Kristian Saliba
Design: Josh Smith,
Editor: Jono Griffith, Final Cut, London
VFX: Speedshape