Brooklyn Nets Challenge:

The original ask was to replace NBA players uniforms in order to cut a new film playing at Barclays Center for the 2019 season kickoff. Source live action footage showed newly acquired Nets players with their prior teams which all needed to be switched into Nets uniforms. We had 3 weeks to complete work on 16 shots which included highly technical 3D-tracking, match-move, and realistic CG rendering. We used a combination of cloth simulations and keyframe animation to create digitally replaced jerseys that behave realistically.

Process: All client assets are uploaded to our cloud server and in sync with our remote teams.We digitally modeled and recreated high resolution jerseys and prepared them for texturing and lighting work in Maya.Our senior level character animator began match-move work on the hardest shots in order to create a basketball environment and cameras for the action. Each digital player is hand animated to match the live action footage so that we can accurately place their jerseys in space.

From match-move our CG technical director can seamlessly open the same scene files for lighting and rendering each jersey on the cloud, making all files available in realtime for our compositor. Our Nuke compositor then takes those renders and creates hold out mattes where the digital jersey’s overlap with with their own bodies. This process involved mesh warping the renders into place and shape and detailed rotoscoping.

Our entire team on this project was remotely located and leveraged our cloud platform in order to gain access to licenses, storage, and processing time. This project can run in unison with multiple projects outside of our own physical infrastructure but is closely managed by own VFX team.

Modeling, Rigging, Match-move, Animation, Rendering, Cloth Simulation, Compositing

Production Company : Visual Comforts
Creative Director Producer : Michael Wiehart

Brooklyn Nets Breakdown >>