Factory Floor with Marshall Brain (Part 1)

Posted in Cinema 4D, Television by Joel Dubin on June 10, 2009

Recently R. Scott Purcell and I (via Betatron) got to develop and create the graphics for the TV series “Factory Floor with Marshall Brain” which aired on the National Geographics Channel.

There were 13 episodes, with about 8 animation calls per show. In the end we produced a little over 100 1080p animation segments within a 5 month period.

In keeping with the shows theme which was primarily engineering, we devised a style that looked like a moving blueprint. Below are a few. Hope to post more soon.

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Jonah Tobias said, on July 16, 2009 at 9:36 am

Really, really well done. I’ve tried to do fx like that before but never got it to look nearly that good.

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Joel Dubin said, on July 16, 2009 at 9:47 am

Thanks so much Jonah. I’ll see if I can post a how to.

Basically we rendered 3 passes for each animation:

1. A beauty render, usually with AO to get the nooks and crannys to show
2. a sketch render (some were done with sketch and toon, some were done via falloff/fresnel to create dark edges like the hot dog one), and depending on the object, 3. an XRAY pass (via fresnel transparency) to allow a peek inside.

These were all layered and masked appropriately in AE and then mixed with the blueprint texture.

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- Jonah Tobias said, on July 16, 2009 at 11:17 am
  
  Thanks for the breakdown + the blog. Good to see hq cinema work.
  
  I never thought of using Ambient Occlusion! Always worth the extra render time, it just helps things look good.
  
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Of Blueprints and Beauty Passes. A look back at Factory Floor. « joel•O•tron said, on August 15, 2011 at 2:17 am

[...] few years ago I got to work on an episodic TV PROJECT called Factory Floor. You may have already seen my other posts about it earlier on in my blog. Yeah, I know, I’m [...]

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joel•O•tron