Looking for a guru to give some input

[Mike Cohen]

Sounds expensive. Reminds me of the down line effect used in football broadcasts, which looks simple enough but is actually very complex and did I mention expensive?

You can get models of just about anything from Viewpoint Datalabs. With a locked-down camera you may be able to register it to a model with enough rehearsal time.

[Robert Garry]

Hey Mike,

Do you know who did the 1st down marker stuff for you? Sportvision or maybe PVI?? I think this is the type of tech I am looking at for this project. And yes I know it’s expensive but until the clients see a budget they dream big!! Any leads would help.

Thanks
Bob

[Tom Meegan]

SportVision would be the direction I would head if I were looking for this sort of work. I’ve worked with them on MLB broadcasts for FOX and most recently in Torino, Italy for NBC. Unfortunately I don’t have the full names of the technicians I’ve worked with, but I’ll look into it if it would be helpful.

Tom

[Robert Garry]

This is the direction I am thinking of heading but I am a little aprehensive of dealing with such a large company. Anyone have any idea if there are smaller shops that may be able to give me the same technology?

I only say this on the specualtion that due to SportVisions contract with networks and probably an affiliation with the large sports organizations it might drive the rates through the roof. Just wondering if there might be some smaller shops out there that might be a little more economical?

Thanks for all the great input so far and for any future ideas.

You guys (and the Cowmmunity) are just great.

Thanks again.
Bob

[Charley King]

You might try Evans & Southerland a Utah based company that builds computer created sets and other simulated graphics. they are very good and being a smaller comapny might be more what you are looking for. They can do wonders with computer and live action projects. I worked with them at NAB about 7 years ago.

https://www.es.com

Charlie

[Mark Suszko]

Let me see if I get what you’re asking:

1. Real car on a stage.

2. You want to project a wireframe *onto* the car, with little animated goings-on that look like cut-aways into it’s inner structure, like the suspension, the engine, or an internal I-beam in the door or something.

3. They would love it if the whole thing could rotate.

Video projectors and/or lasers can project lines onto a car body. Heck, you can use DMX-controlled motorized spotlights to project a grid line gobo pattern onto a car for your “wireframe”.

Projecting video onto the live car’s body means you have to pre-warp the image so as to counter-act distortion by the non-flat surfaces of the car. That would require a powerful multichannel DVE or a rendering from a 3-d program using a virtual camera. Alternately, you use a larger number of projectors each shooting onto just one small section, then the warping load is reduced, but overall complexity increases. Video projectors that are working alongside of spotlights will get washed-out to an extent. Lasers would be better, for several reasons:

A motorized scanning laser, of the type used for those pink floyd type astronomy dome productions, is a vector image painted in realtime by a beam dancing along the projection surface. Persistence of vision in the human eye makes you think you are staring at a line image and not a point. The shape of that surface will do little to warp the image the laser beam would “paint”. So no matter the body shape, your grid would look pretty clean. Laser brightness is also up to sharing the space with spotlights and video projections. I am imagining one laser “painting” the car with the wireframe grid pattern. A second one, or multiple second units, would then be aimed to specific target areas on the body to draw other shapes and etc. to illustrate the points. You could do it in two colors, green and red.

As to spinning everything, if the lasers or projectors were all part of the same turntable, their reference remains fixed, you have no problem. That means either an affair that resembles a merry-go-round with a roof on top, or you have to put the light rigs on their own rotating mount overhead, synched to revolve in time with the ground display. Or maybe you have the lighting on a fixed grid, but it only comes on for each element for the short time the car is facing that projector with the appropriate target area. Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of custom programming. Not cheap or fast to do.

Now, are you talking about putting up a car image on a big screen that looks like a 3-d model that can have wireframes thrown on it and cutaways reveal things… that is pretty garden-variety stuff to do in many animation programs. You can easily animate the car to rotate in space ont he screen as well during the demo. If you can;t get actual 3-d scans of the car (because it’s too new), you can use a program like Canon’s Software Object Modeler (SOM) to create a photorealistic digital model from simple flat photographs of the real object. Once you have the model, you can apply a fake wireframe texture map to it and alternate that texture wherever you want to, with the original texture, or a “see-thru” texture showing off specific internals in a “cut-away” style. That stuff can be done in photoshop or a compoting program like AE or Combustion.

Canon SOM uses photogrammetry to calculate a 3-d shape based on multiple 2-d views you give it. A Typical example would be a small object like a sculpture. You put it on a spacial mat the program prints out for you. The mat is full of alignment targets that automate much of the scanning process. So, mat on a turntable, sculpture on the mat, camera on tripod, shoot an 8 megapixel pic of the thing, turn it 20 degrees, shoot again, repeat until you’ve shot 360 degrees. Import the shots into SOM, it has a simple masking tool you use to delete anything in the backgrund that’s not the sculpture. Hit the button, you get a 3-d model that uses the photos to create it’s own perfect texture map. You can scale up the special target mat to any size with a little effort, and do a full-sized car the same way.

There are several competitor programs to Canon SOM, they all work about the same.

[George Socka]

Mark – who sells the canon software? Can’t find it at the usual suspects up here in Toronto

[Mark Suszko]

Here’s a link to the canon 3dSOM and about seven others that do the same thing. Canoma is listed but has been out of print forever, it was one of the earliest ones, and works a little differently.

https://www.bakhter.com/html/3d/image_modelers.html

I got a free limited (watermarked) demo version of SOM in one of my Digit or Computer Arts magazines, those are great sources for this kind of stuff. If you go to the Digit or Computer Arts magazine web sites, you will no doubt also be able to find links to the demos and the full-price product. Memory is hazy, I want to say it was about $300, last I saw. Compared to what you’d pay a guy to model from scratch, it would pay for itself in one job….

[Hamish Boyd]

This may too little, too late but if I am in the ball park, I do know of a company that has been developing a software/hardware solution that I think could work for you.
It basically is a real time 3d program that can project an environment on a super wide screen (32 x 9) and you can interact with it live. Comes from a gaming technology in the way you can move around a defined space. interact with it. Have video streams running into it. so if a car or a person is presenting on stage they can be incorporated into the virtual environment.

Only catch is that they’re london based.

The company is http://www.cheerfulscout.com

their product is

http://www.nvisiontec.com

These kinda problems are good to be aired because we all learn what and where some really new and interesting stuff is happening!