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.
Premier League Studio
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.
GAA Allianz Leagues Studio
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.