Siggraph 2018 Rewind - Brett Morris: Managing the Carnage of Carmageddon

Brett is Creative Director and founding partner of the motion design studio - Ranger & Fox based in Los Angeles. In this presentation, Brett takes a technical director approach to the creation of "Carmageddon" - a motion graphics project created by and for the studio. His approach to the project illustrates how you can create a project file that provides a lot of parametric control for creative freedom and workflow efficiency.

Brett assembles a freeway rig with simple splines, CV-Chamfer and Xpresso to create a complex freeway rig which can be controlled by a few simple sliders. He adds low-poly elements as a basis for the freeway structure. He then shows how to replace these proxy elements at render time with high density, detailed models using instances.

The end of the Carmageedon short features a tangled web of freeway, undualting upon itself. Brett walks you through his process of creating this cluster of turbulent splines which were generated in Houdini and exported as an Alembic model. He then uses MoSpline to simplify this source spline, while maintaining the point level animation of the Alembic file. Lastly, Brett uses Redshift Proxies to create a variety of colors on cloned cars.

00:49 Demo Reel
03:51 Carmageddon - Studio Project
04:25 The Creative Process Behind Carmageddon
05:59 Creating the Freeway Rig
19:15 Using Instances for the High Density Elements
21:02 Variations on the Instances
27:34 Cluster Spline
37:01 Creating Redshift Proxies to Render Cars of Varying Colors