Platige Image teamed up with Stink Productions and Juice post house to create a visual spot for the BBC's coverage of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. The director from Platige wanted to create a heroic and majestic setting. They convinced the agencies to make the film longer and more epic. Over 50 artists worked on the project for around four months. Rendering the landscapes and simulating ice and snow was challenging due to long render times, but optimizing the scene in V-Ray helped reduce render times. V-Ray's materials, render elements, and efficiency were instrumental in creating the iconic project's visual effects within budget and timeline.

1. 02/2014
making of
Platige
Image
interview with
Tomek Bagiński and Jarosław Handrysik
BBC Winter
Olympics - Nature

2. Creating a majestic setting
The Director at Platige Image Tomek Bagiński, said he really wanted to work on the
spot because he believed it had the power that is unique in commercial production.
He was shown a very good script from London’s Stink. “We convinced the RKCR/
Y&R agency and Stink that the film should be longer and more epic than originally
planned,” he said. “We proposed creating this heroic subject in really majestic, heroic,
unforgettable scenery, and the agency accepted the image.” Platige teamed up with the
agency and Juice post house. Fifty artists produced the project in around four months.
MAKING OF
BBC Winter Olympics - Nature
Platige Image
022014
Poland’s premiere VFX studio Platige Image recently teamed up with London’s Stink
productions and the Juice post house to create a special visual spot for the BBC
coverage of the Sochi Winter Olympics.
Platige Image on Ice

3. Production challenges
Jarosław Handrysik, a rendering artist at Juice, spoke about the challenge.
“Most shots with the mountainous landscapes were created by combining camera
projections and matte paintings,” he said. “That meant we could render them in V-Ray
without global illumination. The caves scene where we were creating the icicles and
rendering the simulation of breaking the ice in the curling scene was difficult. The
main challenge was the render time. At the beginning, one full HD frame rendered in
about nine hours. After optimizing the scene with V-Ray, we cut it back to three hours
per frame, even with GI, SSS and refraction.”
The role of V-Ray
Handrysik added it was the efficiency of V-Ray that helped most in this iconic project.
“V-Ray showed speed, great quality and trouble-free cooperation with all the plug-ins,”
he said. V-Ray’s Render Elements allowed the compositing artists to very precisely
regulate all the values in the rendered image. This helped them to deliver the highest
quality renderings for the job. For compositing they used a range of render passes like
Diffuse, Reflection, Refraction, Specular, Multimatte, Global Illumination, Light Select,
Normals, Object ID, Shadows, SSS, Velocity and ZDepth. “V-Ray’s materials also came
in handy to build the snow shader,” Handrysik said. “This was based on the V-Ray Car
Paint material, with little sparks and flakes added in. There was also a healthy dose of
normal bump and displacement in the frosty mix.”
MAKING OF
BBC Winter Olympics - Nature
Platige Image
022014

4. MAKING OF
BBC Winter Olympics - Nature
Platige Image
022014
Watch a “Making of” breakdown by Platige Image

5. Mountaineering films as
inspiration for simulations
Platige and Juice ran a lot of simulations before reaching the desired effect. Some
shots were quick, dynamic close-ups, while others showed mountainous scenery in
the far distance that required a completely different setup for simulation, balancing
the wind speed and turbulence seen from a long distance. To recreate all these
phenomena, the Platige and Juice crew studied many mountaineering films and
libraries of mountain landscape images. The main tools for creating the snow were
Fume FX, Particle Flow, Krakatoa, as well as some ICE particles in Softimage. Together
with Chaos Group’s V-Ray, they created a heroic setting for this impressive TV spot.
Edited by Paul Hellard
MAKING OF
BBC Winter Olympics - Nature
Platige Image
022014

6. MAKING OF
BBC Winter Olympics - Nature
Platige Image
022014
Watch the BBC Olympics Ad “Nature”

7. See more V-Ray customer success stories
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02/2014
making of
BBC Winter
Olympics - Nature
Platige Image
interview with
Tomek Bagiński and Jarosław Handrysik
platige.com