This most recent spot for the Maryland lottery was a unique challenge for the Smoke & Mirrors CG team. A 5-commercial campaign, each spot features an exuberant fan singing Broadway-style about a prize he or she won and finishes with an animated end shot of M&T bank stadium filled with cheering fans. Tasked with creating this end shot under a very tight deadline, there was not time to fully model, texture, light and render the stadium and then fill it with cheering fans, so the team devised a clever work-around.
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| wireframe model of stadium |
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| model textured with photographs of actual stadium |
One member of the S&M CG team traveled to Baltimore to photograph the M&T Bank Stadium. Using the exact perspective and focal length from those images, the team created a low-res model of the stadium (see image to the left) that was then textured using those images (see image below).
With a textured model of M&T Bank Stadium in place, the next hurdle for the S&M CG team was to fill the stadium with thousands of cheering fans. Check back on Tuesday September 7, 2010 to find out more about how they populated the stadium with 80,000 cheering fans in under 4 seconds.
