Shanghai, February 10 (Xinhua) -- The opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics has brought extremely shocking beauty to audiences around the world. In the two highlights of "Ice and Snow Five Rings" and "Building a Big Snowflake", Shanghai's "Nuclear Octopus Studio" became an animation visual effects team that participated in the opening ceremony video visual effects creation and production. Recently, the team's main creator revealed the technical elements behind the special effects for us.
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At the opening ceremony, the snowflakes were impressive. It is reported that there are three major difficulties in achieving the most beautiful AR (augmented reality) snowflakes: doing AR in the 20-story bird's nest center performance area; multiple camera positions are far apart; each snowflake has a country name, and the name cannot be flipped when flying in the air.
Huang Chen, the main creator of The Nuclear Octopus Studio, said that behind this snowflake, there is a naked-eye 3D technology. Naked-eye 3D needed to find the best visual tracking point, and after repeated testing, the team decided to use the top of the sixth-floor platform as the main visual tracking point, and restored the bird's nest 1:1 in the computer, drawing the animation of this large snowflake.
Team creative design manuscript. (Courtesy of the interviewee)
"This performance is actually very bold, so smooth, so short, but uninterrupted, video-based, the simplicity, wonderful, aesthetic, embodiment of Chinese art, vividly reflected." Huang Chen said.
According to the team's main creators, from participating in the design in April 2021 to finalizing the draft in September, it took more than 5 months and hundreds of drafts were scrapped.
"The design of the five rings of ice and snow is really a big hole." Song Yuefeng said that the director constantly hopes to have Chinese thinking and Chinese aesthetics. The design of the ink humanoid is generally black, but in the transparent and flawless ice cube, highlighting the recognition of the ink villain, they finally joined forces with the black bow team to produce a version of the color ink scheme, only to gradually find the feeling, and finally form a traditional ink dynamic human form, coupled with a very modern laser outline as one of the effect.
The opening ceremony used a giant LED floor, and the screen standing on it was 20 stories high, which was very stressful and difficult for post-rendering. Dozens of computers were running at the same time, and the team checked frame by frame to avoid errors to achieve the best visual effect. The shocking effect of this giant floor fully demonstrates the rapid development of Chinese science and technology.