In the last few days the BBC have launched a new look for their Business slot on the BBC News channel. These are template graphics built in the vizrt graphics platform. The sequence itself was built by the presenter, Ben Thompson, using a template we created.
These were originally designed in Cinema 4D and After Effects by Sophia Kyriacou with input from the news graphics team and the business team. Kenziko’s initial involvement was to evaluate whether the look could be translated into vizrt. We were confident that we could get close enough to keep the overall feel and impact of the design, which is reliant on ambient occlusion to really come to life. We looked at several different approaches before finalising the version now running on-air.
The first thought was perhaps some form of real-time ambient occlusion. Current solutions to this (in real-time graphics) rely on a deferred rendering setup, and the vizrt engine is a forward renderer, so this was quickly rejected.
Initial tests were based on exporting geometry directly from Cinema 4D (C4D) with pre-baked textures. This was quickly ruled out as we ran into major issues with the animation sequences. It was also very hard to match camera perspective between C4D and Viz.
We briefly experimented with rendering video clips of the animations, with the hope that we could add dynamic elements on top and match the two. This also was quickly rejected – there were so many permutations that it was impractical, and the dynamic graphics did not match up adequately with the video clips. We were also asked to ensure that our solution was future-proof for other uses of the graphic elements we were building, which definitively ended this approach.
Our final approach was to go back to the original C4D / After Effects animations and recreate the elements in Viz. Viz’s lighting model is adequate for many types of graphics, but to reproduce the naturalistic lighting we had to introduce some hand-tooled textures, and the ambient occlusion is simulated in much the same way. For more control over the camera, we separated the 3D elements from the overlay elements (titles etc.), using a dynamic texture.
The dynamic nature of template graphics meant we had to rely on masks in many cases to introduce or exclude the ambient occlusion where necessary. We feel the final result is close enough to the original renders to maintain their impact.