Whether it’s in joy or frustration, The NFL Draft makes people want to shout from the rooftops. This year, re:think studios elevated its own ideas when the facility turned CG-enhanced promos for ESPN’s 2012 NFL Draft broadcast into rooftop reels for the nation’s top football prospects.
And since prime-time spots for the nation’s biggest sports channel mean game time for graphics, re:think turned to Luxology’s modo 601 and it’s fast renderer to make all those bright lights, and brighter talents, stand out.
Starting from colorful storyboards created in tandem with The Vault NYC – an advertising agency that also helped with the concept – re:think brought a CGI world full of a run-and-gun passing, swift rushes, neon letters, ESPN analysts, and the NFL Draft logo to life. To provide a dynamic look to the fast-moving sequences, each non-video set piece was rendered with modo, which helped the studio score big: The team was working on a production schedule that needed to be even quicker than the players.
“We needed a software package that would render like the wind,” said Brian Bullock, Founder and Head of CGI at re:think Studios. “Modo is definitely the right tool for high-quality, flicker-free animation.”
Having already employed modo’s rendering engine on past projects, re:think studios knew it could be used to render out multiple EXRs reliably, without any fuss or extra coding. This allowed the crew to focus on the artistic aims of the project, instead of worrying over technical details. And with Alembic-based file-transfer tools, re:think artists were able to move back and forth through their favorite 3D software programs with ease.
“Without modo, we’d probably still be rendering frames right now,” added Bullock. “We rely heavily on its photorealistic engine because we can put our trust in the output. It has delivered excellent results quickly, time after time. And time, in this industry, is money.”