Last night saw the first outing of my latest virtual studio set for Setanta Sports. It’s once again based on the ‘white’ set I built for the Premier league and GAA programmes, but tweaked slightly to accommodate Setanta’s swanky new desk.
As usual it is rendered in real-time with full camera tracking thanks to the awesome power of RT Software’s tOG 3D system.
UEFA Champions League Studio
By now, I hope, plenty of lucky viewers* will have seen my latest virtual studio set in action for Euro 2012. It’s for Setanta Sports and as usual is running on Setanta’s tOG system from RT Software
Euro 2012 Virtual Studio
Saturday saw the launch of two new virtual studios for Setanta Sports. They are the latest in a number of planned new looks rolling out this year – both are based around a single new VR set with a backdrop of seamless virtual screens. I’ll probably do a separate post outlining some of the design process – which might be quite interesting as I now have a much more accurate way of determining what section of the virtual screen appears behind each camera shot. I have also built a single After Effects project that automatically outputs a combination of five HD and SD seamlessly looping animations for the screens as well as a number of special texture maps for various surfaces of the surrounding 3D model.
Here’s the new set for the Premier League. The imagery features a couple of super-hi-resolution 3D renders of the premier league trophy (kindly supplied by David Phelan at Mode Vision Ltd), mixed with a load of additional layers to provide a little gentle (and seamlessly looping) animation. And finally lens flare effects using Video Copilot’s Optical Flares plug-in of course.
And here’s the new GAA set.
It uses the same 3D studio model as the studio above, but with a new set of animating screens inspired by stadium floodlights (which figure prominently in the title sequence). I built an HD looping crowd animation and used it to fill up a high-resolution daytime (empty) stadium shot, before giving the whole thing a dusky twilight feel, replacing the original sky with one taken from outside my studio in Leitrim. And finally, of course, plenty of optical flares.
Once again, the screens and additional textures have all been built within, and output from, one mighty After Effects project.
Here’s the full version of the new title music for the Setanta Sports show iTalkSport. I must have been too busy in the previous post writing about the new virtual studio set that I forgot to mention that I also did the theme tune.
Listen here:
iTalkSport title music
Virtual Studio Sets
Recently completed – a brand new virtual studio set for Setanta’s iTalkSport show that launched on Friday.
iTalkSport is a late-night sport discussion programme and the set prominently features views of the Dublin skyline.
This virtual set project consisted of two main challenges – designing and building the actual structure of the set, and putting ‘live’ shots behind the presenters and guests.
It was a close call whether we would be using four permanently mounted roof-top cameras to feed the backgrounds. In the end we went for a less expensive (but more complicated!) solution. The whole thing is running on the RT Software tOG VR system, isn’t dependent on the weather, and has the uncanny feature of rendering street-lamps invisible.
I’ll give a full behind-the-scenes glimpse later on, but for now, here are some grabs from Friday’s show.
Virtual Set
You can see it on some of the Magners League shows, and it’s also on air for ‘The Hub‘ with a different logo in the virtual screen.
As usual, it was built as a 3D model in Cinema 4D and then painstakingly textured up using my special secret process (which I may reveal as another blog post at some point).
Finally, it was exported as an fbx file which I loaded into tOG (by RT Software) for some final tweaks before the whole thing was zipped up and downloaded by Setanta at their end.
It was a pretty fast turnaround for this one – under a week to get it on air, with a few updates supplied after the first TX.
