Hi Guys,
We have been getting a lot of questions about the
Stronghold Animation so we thought we would share the answers with everyone.
This was done by two CG Artists (see attached photo) at AutomationDirect, plus myself and one other adivsor.
The entire project took three months:
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Mid Sept – Game Concept revealed to AutomationDirect
Mid Oct – Script Complete
End Oct – Animatic complete (Took 7 rev’s)
- CAD files start arriving
- CG team starts modeling assets.
Nov - Creating/building Assets
- Begin Animating
Dec - Received final CAD Files
- Continue Creating/Building Assets
- Animating
- Lighting
- Textures
Mid Dec – Delivered full animation WITHOUT rendering.
- Started rendering scenes.
The team worked through Christmas (literally) and delivered the final animation 12/27.
The seamless transition between the real field flyover and the animated version was accomplished by modeling the camera used to do the fly over of the real field to get the exact same view and then employed motion tracking to track the motion of the live camera during the transition. Worked out pretty well, eh?
Entire animation was done in
Blender, with post done in
Adobe After Effects.
Render Time: about 2000 hours.
Render Farm: 7 PC’s most of which have 64 core processors and high end graphics cards for GPU rendering.
- - - - - - Fun Fact - - - - -
The lead CG Artist got his start doing the original
FIRST Robotics Autodesk Animation Award.
I’m gonna get in trouble for doing this, but here are his first two attempts at “animating:”
2005 Safety Animation 2006 Autodesk Animation Award
That was 10 years ago. Compare that to this year’s
Stronghold Animation. He’s come a long way since then. Got a huge scholarship to go to the Savanna College of Art and Design (SCAD) – mostly due to his portfolio of
FIRST Animations – graduated and came to work at AutomationDirect. His partner in crime also went to SCAD and specialized in Lighting – which explains the beautiful look of the Stronghold video. Both are considered CG generalists and create videos and other digital media items promoting AutomationDirect’s products. Here’s a few examples:
How to Buy a PLC,
Big PLC Job,
DIY Christmas,
Robotics. Cool job ...
All of which explains why AutomationDirect is excited to sponsor the “
Dave Lavery Animation Award**.” These opportunities FIRST and FIRST Communities provide have repercussions way beyond just building robots.
Of course, you guys know that …
Let us know if you have any other questions!
- Rick
** Note that this is not currently an official FIRST award, rather it is posted in the
FIRST community sponsored awards section of the FIRST website. Let us know if you have any questions.
p.s. I would be remiss if I didn’t remind everyone to use their
2016 KOP Voucher to buy whatever they want at
AutomationDirect. There’s around 20,000 different parts in stock here, so check it out. I’ll bet we have SOMETHING you need.