Vehicle Animation: Police Operation at Barbarossaplatz

Simulation vs. Animation – How traffic simulation and vehicle simulation can interact.

Actually, we just wanted to test the suitability of our new render software for large scenes – the first results were so much fun that the idea came up to create a night city scene with traffic. Our traffic simulation software RealTraffic should come into use again so that we could animate many vehicles with little effort. For the main actors, a fully electric Jaguar I-Pace and two police cars, we used our vehicle simulation DRIVE. We were also able to test how both simulations can interact, because the vehicles in the traffic flow that are not individually animated, had to react to the DRIVE vehicles, which of course didn\'t care about traffic rules. The script was so much fun that we then approached it as a serious project.

From a technical point of view, it was primarily a matter of exploring whether rendering software that only runs on the graphics processor can handle a large, memory-intensive scene and whether the rendering times are slow enough to render smaller projects in-house.

We had already used the Barbarossaplatz in Cologne as scenery in an earlier traffic animation, so we already had the road network including traffic light controls and the buildings, the latter only as clay models (i.e. without material shaders) with few details. So there was a lot of work to do in terms of modeling and shading, ideal conditions for a software test!

Although Octane has occasionally crashed, which is especially nasty if you didn\'t save your project in time or if a nightly render job is canceled on the first frame, having a quick preview while you work is very productive and time-saving. that are very close to the final rendering. The final rendering was performed on a new workstation equipped with an Nvidia RTX3090 and additionally connected to an external GPU with RTX2080 via Thunderbolt. The rendering time per frame was an average of 90 seconds.