We delivered an evolution in visual style halfway between game ready graphics and highly polished renders built with Unity, Alembic, and great motion design.
CREDITS:
Producer
Alexander Reyna
Creative Director
Alexander Reyna/David Mayzis
Role
Style Frames, Lighting, Render Wrangle
Collaborators
David Mayzis, Motion Design
We began our exploration by playing with visual style, lighting, and level of detail.
We settled on a highly polished look that accentuates the key, split second, moments of baseball action.
Our stories are always told through the exploits of our players, so it made sense to create a piece that explores the drama between players, teams, and their environments.
Lighting Motion Tests
We wanted a strong, rim lit, sophisticated style to tease our viewers with glimpses of the athletes. We moved our time of day and weather away from the typical middle of the day clear skies to give out shots more drama and substance.
We developed new techniques to render high quality assets from Unity.
Using a blend of 3rd party tools and custom scripting, we created a pipeline that allowed us to generate passes similar to traditional 3d software. Passes such as depth and effects greatly enhanced our ability to create shots with nuanced DOF, glints, glares, and camera effects.
Using Unity Cinemachine, Timeline and Alembic, we rendered game assets back into traditional 3d and Composite.
Developing techniques like this allowed us to use all post effects, passes, and additional animations added on top of the base original elements. This process made adding position exact particles, dust, and more easier and ultimately led to a higher quality look.