3D robots breakdance in the street for Audi

An army of robots bust some serious moves in this new ad for Audi, created by VFX facility Framestore. The studio first became involved with the project after being approached by the spot's director Noam Murro. "Noam has worked with Framestore for many years and was confident that we were the right studio to bring the idea to life," says VFX and CG supervisor Simon French.

The Framestore team were provided with robot designs, which came from Noam's production designer - put together from images of classic tin robots. "We then had to reinterpret the designs to enable the freedom of movement required to convey the fluid human movement captured in the mo-cap session, while keeping true to the tin robot theme," French says.

Robot renders

3d software Maya provided the tools needed to create the complex movements. "It was the backbone of the job," French comments. "Its batch processing abilities enabled us to process the large amounts of mo-cap and geometry data.

"We built a system for laying out mo-cap that enabled scenes to be set-up very quickly from the mo-cap selects coming from the editors. We also created a system that baked out mo-cap cycles into discreet components that could be recalled at render time and selectively or randomly swapped for alternative components to add variety to the crowds of robots."

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