LigaTotal - Promo Opener from Felix Schaller on Vimeo.

Originally we decided to make all content for "Bundesliga@home" - how the original of "Liga Total!" was called yet in the pitch, But due of a short deadline (as usual in germany) we where forced to cut down the inhouse developement to the on Air Elements of "Liga Total!" which was created in cooperation with Infinite Vision. The additional Trailer (not shown here) was made by the postproduction "Acht" in Frankfurt and was coordinated by manuel.

I was predominantly responsible for the 3D content of the Full Picture Elements, such as the background stadium etc.
Especially the lawn on the playground was a pretty tricky one, because it should look real.

rendering with 3D grass would have looked to artificial and rendertimes would have been exorbitant high for a pretty simple shot.

projecting textures on ground would have looked pretty crappy and ugly

So i decided a solution which i once tested rarely, but at the end worked pretty well. Combined with a special shader development i had great results for the lighting.

At first i took a ideal lawn texture and cut some strips of grass put (with transparency) where i sorted them by big grass (closer camera area) and fine grass (apart areas from camera). Then setting up some poly cards, who shall later display the grass textures. Those "cards" i put on the ground, facing frontal to the camera to the sector where the camera moved.

According that you do not see gaps in between the "cards" caused by occlusion or lights i build togeather a shader which only orientates by surface ligting and is steered through a ramp.

This ramp fades in between dark and light color definitions according to the recieved light. But this alone doesn't make the Lawn look seemless and responding correctly to the lights, because the lighting it should respond is like being a flat surface and not vertical cards who rader tend to occlude and shade the light in between the card caps. To make the lawn soft with no occlusion, i used a little trick which then gave a smooth feedback between light and the cards:

Bending the Vertex Normals

By Bending the Vertex Normals to the scene Up Vector with "Edit Vertex Normals" the Normal feedback responds similar as if the cards would be laying on the flat ground showing their face up to the sky.
Thereby all the light recieved by the "cards" appealed not occluded.

In enhancing that i could make later wide camera Movements and Dynamic lighting where many Camera angles were possible.