Motorstorm was one of the launch titles for PS3 in 2006. We were asked to produce a series of movies that would be run in the background of the the GUI and user setup screens and had to set the scene and give a flavour of the environment and carnival atmosphere of the event. I worked on two specific shots and helped out on a few more.

Patterns was created in Lightwave. The vehicles and some of the set where supplied by the developers but needed reuving and optimising for FMV. Our biggest challenge with Motorstorm was that everything had to be rendered at HD1080 which put a huge strain on our renderfarm and our own computers. The crowds in this shot were created from a small subset of morphing characters with their morph loops offset. We didn’t have the overheads to have rigged or even mdd displaced characters so this seemed the most viable solution. We also split the scenes up into layers to give us more control in the composite and reduce the chance of costly rerenders. These are some of the layers for Patterns.

This image is a bit misleading as it actually consists of about 10 layers of crowd objects that we shot to make up the whole scene.

Firejump was originally animated and setup by Andy and was then passed to me for finishing. However I changed everything other than the animation and matte painting which were both excellent.

The car was re-uv’d and textured, the ramp modelled and textured, fire created, lots of incidental objects were added to the environment, the lighting was changed as was the dust, smoke and light effects. Various tricks were done in the comp and the edit to add to the feel.

On Chicken Run I just did the fire and smoke.

We had a whole load of problems rendering this and in the end weren’t able to add all the sparks and lighter smoke and debris.

For Road I animated the cars, the dust, modelled some of the foreground elements and did the final comp.  All the rest was done by Steve.

This is the screen-fillable, scalable video.

Two years later we were asked to do the intro for Motorstorm:Pacific Rim. We were very busy at the time so could only commit to the first section of it while the rest was given to Realtime UK. My only part was to texture a couple of ships right before final comp.