Driving Auto-Realism over Rough Terrain for 2012

About 5 years ago. I’d had the idea for a while and then I hired a programmer to start developing it. Took about a year to get to the part where we could start using it. We’ve used it for a ton of commercial projects, but this is the first time we’ve used it for a movie.

 

The Drive-A-Tron is basically a production tool to create photorealistic vehicle motion. When making car commercials, for a long time now we’ve been able to render photoreal vehicle with 3D graphics… but when the vehicles are in motion, if they’re animated by animators you can always tell they don’t really weigh 3,000 pounds. A lot of these details in the way a car moves were never convincing in the hands of an animator. You can’t really animate the way a car moves—it’s almost too complex, especially if it moves over an uneven surface. The thing about moving vehicles is so many of us drive cars and see them around us—we know what they look like and can detect when even the slightest detail is off.

We solve this problem by simulating car movement using physics. The great thing about it is not only does it make the cars look real, the time it takes to do it is really minimal. For example, if you have a car driving 5 seconds, it takes 5 seconds to simulate that motion.

 

We had to do some pretty expensive additional software development to make this project work because never before had we encountered a situation where we had to simulate a car driving over ground that’s moving. So whatever road data we brought in in the past, it was always a static model. But in this case, the ground was breaking into pieces and dropping several feet and raising several feet during an earthquake. So we added the capability to bring in this animated moving sequence of road data.

 

And then it added layers of complexity to the actual driving. If you were to make the wrong time and be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the car would drop and you’d hit as much as a five foot wall in front of you as the ground beneath you dropped below the next chunk of ground.

 

Once the train’s moving, we set up a vehicle—in this case a stretch limo. So we enter into the computer how heavy it is, what kind of engine it has, the transmission, the suspension, how heavy it is, even down to how much air pressure is in each tire. Once that’s all set up you can do tons and tons of takes. You just hit the start button and push the ‘gas’ and begin driving. Once you get to the end, you can review it and play back the action from any angle and you can keep it or not. If you liked it you would save it. Then you can hit the start button again…dozens and dozens in a matter of minutes.

 

We had effects supervisor who had worked with us in the past, when they saw the previs of what needed to be done in this sequence they recommended that they look into our capabilities with our driving simulator. We did a few tests to show what it could do and they loved it.

 

Now because of that we’re in discussions with a number of stunt driving with this. In enables you to do thing that you’ve never been able to do before. You can get cars into places where you might not be able to get a permit to shoot something so dangerous, because there’s a risk of property damage, Now you can just shoot at the location without the car chase and then add the chase later. The Drive-A-Tron figures out what happens to each wheel as you drive over specific features of that location…a drainage channel or a manhole cover—it will react to everything that’s there.

 

I was going to ask, Are you going to branch out more into features more, but it sounds like it’s already happening!

We’re in preliminary discussions for a movie with three very extensive car chases that we’re really excited about.

 

 

Yeah, there are definitely times where we tinker with the settings beyond what’s realistic. But we always start with what’s real. So for example, we did a car commercial that was based on an arcade game from the 80s called Spy Hunter and the cars had to drive very aggressively. We had to adjust some settings and basically had the equivalent of Formula 1 racing tires on the car, wheels that would really stick to the road. Sometimes we’ll make a car lighter than it actually is or an engine more powerful for good acceleration. You can actually change gravity—we have one demo in the system where gravity is set to 1/6 of normal and you can drive around inside a crater on the moon.

 

So if you had a movie set in the future and there will several moon colonies and you had traffic on the moon, this would be a great way to create the vehicle traffic in that reduced gravity environment.