Creating a 3D Graphics Package

Extensive use of MoGraph Cloner objects made this
scene easier to animate than conventional methods.

I'm tempted to throw in a football metaphor or two to help explain the challenge of creating an entire day's worth of graphics for the NFL Network, but I'll pass—mostly.

The NFL Network called Big Machine Design (BMD) in early summer and asked us to create a new look and feel for its Sunday football coverage, known as NFL GameDay. The network wanted more impact and energy throughout the package while maintaining a relationship to its current on-air look. Ultimately, this project would involve more than 100 on-air elements, toolkits, and project files.

Maxon Cinema 4D's 64-bit capabilities made it much faster to work with high-poly scenes.

Six years into our history, executing an entire day's worth of graphics no longer elicited the panicked response it would have in our earlier days. Our team of producers and designers assembled within minutes of that first call to develop a realistic schedule and plan.

This project was going to involve heavy 3D modeling and animation. Our 3D platform of choice is Maxon's Cinema 4D (C4D). It's easy to learn yet powerful in its abilities. It also happens to be the 3D software that the NFL Network itself uses for many of its 3D projects, allowing us to share assets easily with our client. The Studio Bundle of C4D includes unlimited licenses of the render client, which allows us to distribute the rendering load across multiple machines for improved workflow and productivity.

We created ready-to-go concepts, all developed with C4D and Adobe After Effects. Ready-to-go is a process we use to streamline production and give our clients an almost exact view of what they'll be getting as a final product. Instead of mocking up boards, we build them for real. If a client likes a concept, it is literally ready to go.

Every one of our designers is cross-proficient in Cinema 4D and After Effects. We also employ Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator as staples in our production arsenal.

C4D Timeline

To define the look of the GameDay package, we created an entire world populated with black, glossy shapes and glowing blue energy sources. Silver trim served as an accent to the clean lines and forms used throughout. C4D's MoGraph Spline Wrap was used extensively to create those smooth, curved shapes based on more easily modeled rectangular shapes.

C4D's MoGraph Spline Masking also made it easy to create complex shapes with Boolean-like properties that could be animated without a significant performance penalty that sometimes occurs with standard Boolean objects.

The 64-bit power of C4D allowed us to populate the scene with as much detailed geometry as we desired without sacrificing performance. The MoGraph Cloner was used to create patterns of objects, such as display screens, that would have been difficult to control using conventional objects.

C4D F-Curve editor

The explosive collisions, speed, energy, and force of football come to life in the NFL Network's GameDay on-air graphics package. Dynamic camera moves, clever object animation, and restrained use of particles contribute to the high energy level while still feeling refined.

Visual impact was achieved using C4D's Thinking Particle module to create powerful spark explosions, which we enhanced using Trapcode Particular in After Effects.

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In addition, the tight integration between C4D and After Effects provides seamless compositing using the 3D camera and lighting data along with object position and rotation information. We also took advantage of C4D's multipass rendering to create hold-out mattes and depth-of-field passes for use in After Effects.

On approval from the NFL, BMD rendered final versions of the elements at a resolution of 1920x1080. We used eight-core Apple Mac Pro workstations with 16GB of RAM to provide an efficient and stable platform for our rendering. We then used Final Cut Pro to QC the final renders in realtime using our AJA Kona 3 card. The Kona 3 card allows us to view SD downconverted images at the same time as the HD output, cutting QC time in half.

External compositing tags and object buffers allow for team logo replacement in Adobe After Effects.

BMD also created multiple After Effects toolkits, which will allow the NFL to create custom versions of the graphics we designed throughout the season. We prerendered particle effects and lens flare effects to speed up rendering and allow the use of the toolkits on machines which may not have those specialized plugins.

The GameDay graphics designs are currently on air, and millions of football fans can see our work when they tune into the NFL Network's round-the-clock coverage on Sundays.

As always, we remain grateful to our hard-working staff, our client—the NFL Network—and for the availability of great digital tools that inspire us to bring our creative excellence to life.

Ken Carlson is creative director of Big Machine Design of Burbank, Calif. He has worked as a senior supervising show producer, photojournalist, and designer.