Creating consistency

The first step was to create a list of cars that you might see in New York. Then an important step was to make sure we could quickly change base properties of the vehicles. We used 10 vehicles which had all their Material ID’s matching. This means, the paint material ID was these same for each vehicle. This allowed us to randomized the colors of each vehicle as well as helping the compositing team work faster.

Cars, cars, everywhere

We tried to cram in as many cars as we could. In order to show cars avoiding the talent we also had a spread them out a bit. Each tire had an automatic tire rotation and turning script. Sometime these would update automatically unless I was late for dailies.

Each car also had a very simple human character ( 0:13 sec ). Dont laugh to hard.

The New York’s taxis were reused many time as anyone that has visited NYC will know the they are on ever corner. Each one had custom-made Ads.

Creating and destroying a bus

I had the most fun part of the project here. The bus was custom-built for this project. It needed to be divided up into real pieces. Where there was a seam on the bus it needed to exist in the model. I needed all these so that when we finally destroyed it the viewer would believe what the saw.

In the style of Hollywood, the bus flipping over wasn’t enough. It needed to chase the lead actor down the street and create a “almost got you” ending.

I got to watch a lot of semi-truck roll over and buses hitting objects at speed videos. I then hand animated the bus driving down the street, the driver getting shot (which wasn’t really shown), losing control, ramming a parked SUV, and especially fall over on its side. This was all dynamically driving a Thinking Particle system that would detach and throw random object off it : Seats, metal bars, trash, etc.