Q&A with John Fragomeni and Andrew Chochrane: Re: Cinema 4D

Q&A with John Fragomeni and Andrew Chochrane: Re: Cinema 4D Workflow in Massive Production of Immersive 360° Content for “Vegas: Alter Your Reality” Virtual Reality Art Collection

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March 27, 2018 - The new ‘Vegas: Alter Your Reality’ (VAYR) 360 virtual art experience, produced for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Association (LVCVA), is a unique destination brand marketing program that features an interpretation of the Las Vegas experience – the attractions, night life, restaurants, and more “only in Las Vegas” scenes – in virtual reality (VR) through the lens of five of the world’s top artists: Beeple, Adhemas Batista, Fafi, Insa and Signal Noise.

John Fragomeni Creative & Media Entertainment Executive, and Andrew Cochrane, Immersive Creator and Director, were contracted by R+R Partners to handle the VR production. Throughout the six-month project, the team working in conjunction with Sunset West Media production studio in Los Angeles, relied on MAXON Cinema 4D, and Cineversity plug-ins CV-ArtSmart and CV-VR Cam, to create five individual VR videos totaling 12.5 minutes of immersive 4K stereo animation.

The virtual art collection debuted last December at the prestigious annual Art Week and Art Basel festival in Miami and can be experienced now on the Vegas VR app. The activation is presently scheduled at select locations around the world.

Fragomeni and Cochrane have been at the forefront of VR production since 2013, and together have more than 30 years experience in live action, design, animation, post-production and high-end visual effects. Fragomeni has extensive experience in film, TV, music videos, commercials, interactive and emerging media - including feature film work on “Pacific Rim,” “Terminator Salvation” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Cochrane, has directed top immersive experiences for brands such as Google, Intel, and USA Today.

MAXON recently caught up with Fragomeni and Cochrane to speak about the 3D creative experience in producing virtual reality content for this massive production.

MAXON: According to the LVCVA press materials, ‘Vegas: Alter Your Reality” is described as a “…creative interpretation of the Las Vegas experience, direct from the minds of five distinguished, international artists. Transformed into vibrant and immersive content pieces, their personal narratives are given the ultimate presentation as a virtual reality art collection...” At what point were you and the Sunset West Media team brought into the project?

JF: It all began in early 2017 with a call from Vaitari Anderson, Executive Producer, and Creative Director, Dwayne Grech at R+R Partners, for the VAYR project. From the start we knew that to bring this to experience to its full potential meant we had to break away from the traditional client/vendor paradigm. This was a not only a collaboration but a partnership where art meets technology.

MAXON: You commented that 360º production is still relatively new, with very few projects of any scale attempting the amount and level of work that this project required. What made this project so unique?

AC: Most 360º content is either a tie-in with an entertainment property or a product – marketing has driven most of this emerging medium thus far. This project is rare in that there was no mandate other than for each of the artists to create. R+R Partners and the LVCVA were uniformly focused on maintaining the purity of this goal. In every way, this is an art installation project, with Las Vegas as its patron.

MAXON: What were your pre-production discussions like on VAYR? More specifically, how did your CG animation team work with each of the artists in bringing their ideas and impressions into the virtual world?

JF: Our team of CG design and animation experts worked directly with each artist to guide them through an asset creation phase where they made individual images and style frames in 2D for our team to use as the basis for our 3D work in Cinema 4D.

Each two-to-three-minute immersive video is a direct translation of the artist’s work into VR, with assets they created and that our production team converted into 3D using Cinema 4D and CV-ArtSmart, then animated and rendered into omni-directional stereo using CV-VR Cam.

VAYR_Maxon_01_Cinema4Dscreenshot credit _ © Sunset West Media

AC: The process was fluid and involved back and forth discussions and interactive sessions. We worked from production story boards and artists’ mood boards with references to their 2D animations or in some cases even a 2D file that we could extrude and turn into a 3D asset in Cinema 4D for animation and rendering.

MAXON: What software tools were used in the production pipeline to insure each artist’s vision of Las Vegas would be interpreted uniquely in VR?

AC: Artistically styling 3D simulations and animations to match a two-dimensional aesthetic in a fully immersive 360º world required a multi-faceted team and a flexible production approach. We used Cinema 4D as our primary tool for rigging, animation, environment creation, particle effects, and lighting, with OTOY Octane for rendering. Adobe After Effects and Autodesk Fusion 360 were used to composite and Mettle's Skybox plugins used to create content and to make WIP edits in Adobe Premiere so that we could check progress in the VR headsets.

VAYR_Maxon_04_(credit- “Futuristic Playground” by Beeple _ ©Sunset West Media

MAXON: Tell us about the 3D VR workflow challenges your team faced creating such a huge volume of immersive content for VAYR.

JF: The sheer volume and variety of needs that these five films presented as far as we are aware is unprecedented in 360º animation. Using Cinema 4D, with the addition of complex simulations from SideFX Houdini and Next Limit RealFlow, we successfully modeled, textured, lit, rigged, simulated, and rendered over 500 2D assets that had to be converted into 3D or wholly created in CG.

AC: We relied on Cinema 4D techniques from pretty much everything we have ever worked on. Converting Signal Noise and Batista’s Adobe Illustrator files would have taken months if not for CV-Artsmart. Making Insa’s desert shatter pushed the MoGraph and Rigid Body systems beyond anything we have ever attempted in Cinema 4D to date. Additionally, we used CV-VR Cam heavily on Batista’s film which proved ideal for realizing his 2D /illustrated style in VR. Beeple is a prolific Cinema 4D power user and his VAYR piece was created almost entirely using the software with Octane as the renderer. Uniquely, he would handoff his scene files to our team to do all final lighting, finishing and rendering.

VAYR_Maxon_02_credit- “Don’t Look Down” by Insa_ ©Sunset West Media

VAYR_Maxon_05_credit- “Vegas Rising” by Signalnoise _ ©Sunset West Media)

VAYR_Maxon_03_credit- “The Spectacle of Vegas” by Adhemas Batista _ ©Sunset West Media)

JF: We enjoyed a close technical partnership with Paul Babb and Rick Barrett of the MAXON US team, which helped us confidently process all VAYR shots through Cinema 4D. We needed R&D support and did things that pushed the boundaries without an engineering group on the project. The MAXON team was huge help, being just a phone call or email away to get quick answers to any questions and find solutions to any technical needs, which enabled a very smooth workflow.

MAXON: The VAYR video project’s focus is on individual artists capturing their experience of Las Vegas so that they can be viewed on VR headsets. Were there special considerations in setting up the production pipeline?

JF: With a terrific vision of the scope, lending on the experience of building, managing and running post/VFX studios and thorough extensive pre-planning we assembled an entire production facility in just a week.

Every workstation was a quad-GPU beast, a total of 68 Titan XPs boasting a combined 243,712 Cuda cores, with a total capacity of 816,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second. This gave us the seamless and efficient throughput to handle the demanding amount of data and workload. The team was relatively small given the sheer volume of work – we generated over 2 million frames in the process of creating the final 12.5 minutes of 4K stereo animation.

MAXON: What did you and your team most enjoy about working on the VAYR project?

AC: The creative collaboration between our team, R&R, and the artists was a dream come true, and the initial brief to “just make art” was never abandoned.

JF: This project came down to the creative scope and freedom to make fresh content on a relatively new story platform as we pushed creative and technical limits. We’ve worked with Cinema 4D across hundreds of projects over the years, but this one demanded us to genuinely push it harder than we have ever done before which led to almost daily discoveries of techniques that we’ll be using for years to come.

Sunset West Media credit list:

John Fragomeni – Creative Executive

Andrew Cochrane – Creative Director

Paul Pianezza – Post Producer

Ryan Hitch – Post Producer

Roy Edwards – TD/Pipeline

Ryan Fragomeni – Post Production Assistant

Max Forward - Storyboards

John Robson – Creative Lead

Itzik Roitman – Creative Lead

Liam Ward – Digital Artist

Matt Shadis – Digital Artist