Towards the end of production of the PC soccer management game "Kicker Manager 2004" we were asked to create rendered ingame sequences, intro and a credits movie on behalf of Proline Software. We had two month to finish 38 minutes of ingame soccer scenes with up to 10 players per scene, a two minutes credits movie and a 23 seconds intro sequence.

 

Pre-production

We used the first month for pre-production. In this time the stadium, a soccer player model and textures were created. At the same time the station was lit. Based on first test renderings we started to optimize the scenes to be able to handle scenes in Maya and render them on our render farm within the given time frame.

 

Lighting

Since the scenes should be rendered using Maya's software renderer and we wanted to achieve soft shadows, raytrace shadows were no option due to high render times. Shadow maps on the other hand were not capable of catching details like the player or a ball since the whole stadium had to cast shadows. Hence Dirk Bialluch developed a special light setup, with spotlights linked to stadium, each player and the ball. Using constraints the spotlights were aligned to the players and the ball. This setup allowed us to keep the size of shadow maps as low as possible and make full use of the maps.

 

Animation

Animation of the soccer players is based on motion capturing. To record authentic motions we rented Ambient Entertainment's Vicon8 mocap studio for a day. Carla Heinzel was responsible for rigging of the player model and cleanup of the mocap data. The data were stored as Maya clips in a motion library and assembled later on using Trax. In this way up to 10 players were animated per scene.

To be able to work on the scenes more quickly we risked an attempt to use a beta version of Maya 6.0, which we had at our disposal for a few weeks already as an official beta site. Although we encountered a few limitations, the animation could be created without major problems on the whole.

 

Camera

The camera should involve the spectator directly in the action. Thus our decision to simulate a hand held camera that could move arbitrarily across the field. An irregularity in the camera's movement and the chosen point of view should enhance cuts between individual scenes, because scenes were assembled later in any order by the game's logic. We paid attention to avoid following the action all too linearly and to choose a point of view that reflects the impressive size of a stadium.

 

Rendering und Compositing

The scenes were rendered in two separate layers. The first layer included the stadium and perimeter advertising. The second layer contained turf, players and the ball. Assembling of the layers and color grading was done in Digital Fusion. Using the z-channel the images were desaturated and blurred with increasing distance.

Due to the extremely tight deadline we had to settle the final look in the very early stages of the project, later causing less optimal results in a few scenes. The images and movie sequences shown further below have been reworked and do not correspond to the images in the game in terms of color and contrast.

For more information about the game please refer to the official website.