Jackpot City Casino

With branches in Madrid, Barcelona, Portugal, Peru and Chile, the VFX & digital post production studio i-real Studios released their lastest amazing work, Jackpot City Casino. Modeling, animation, simulations, dynamics, and layout were entirely made with LightWave 3D and “LightWave successfully copes with absolutely everything”! i-real Studios opens their doors and share with us all the details of their stunning project.

i-real Studios: Jackpot City Casino was a very challenging work. It's a TV commercial that has a high degree of realism, with a lot of dynamics, and simulations, in a one single long take sequence shot, so that everything had to be integrated in the same scene and it had to work properly from beginning to end.

Our client is a UK Company based in London, and we are based in Spain, in Madrid, since we founded our CGI 3D VFX Postproduction Company over 15 years ago. Thanks to the high versatility and speed of our workflow network system (headed by our best beloved LightWave 3D, for we used it in absolutely all works since ) we developed a real time work system, so that our UK client could give us instructions and watch all changes, all results, everything in real time in his own computer screens, just as if he was sitting next to us at our desks, in our office in Madrid.
We believe this is actually the way we have managed to get a wide list of international satisfied clients, in many countries worldwide. And we feel very grateful to all of them for their loyalty over the years.

In order to get the sophisticated realistic finish our client required, we made especially detailed models and textures. For instance, table baizes contain thousands of little hairs that we added through LightWave's native instances. This project definitely confirmed to us that Arnold is an excellent alternative render engine for production. We had previously already made a TV commercial with Arnold (Casino Luck) that was simpler, with a much more cartoon-like finish. It worked very well at that time, but we were still craving for seeing it in more complex situations. The fact is it didn't disappoint us. Solid Angle's render engine works really fine, and the integration with LightWave made by Juanjo González is very well done, combining both products's characteristics very easily. So we used objects, instances, dynamics, caches, procedurals,etc from LightWave, and we lighted them with lights and shaders from Arnold in Layout itself, watching the results at IPR window in real time. The very few problems that came up with this combination were solved by Juanjo in a few hours. We have to praise his technical support work he has offered to us in this year and a half we have been testing his plugin.

All works of modeling, animation, simulations, dynamics, and layout in general, were entirely made with LightWave. We used Bullet to calculate collisions of spins, cards and coins, and for curtain fabric simulation. As it is a long take sequence shot, there's only one single scene, a huge scene, with hundreds of objects moving synchronously, with hundreds of simulations cached in MDDs, hundreds of thousands of instances, over 150 images (some of them with sequences), dozens of morphs... as we say, a very big and very complex scene.

As we already knew, LightWave successfully copes with absolutely everything. LightWave handled the scene in all its versions extremely easily, smoothly and fluently. Since the beginning we worked on the dynamics, with simplified objects, to create the animatic. Afterwards, we only had to replace initial objects with final ones, in higher quality, so as to have all simulations running at maximum detail. When the complexity of your work is increasing step by step, more and more, starting less, finishing more, it is highly useful to have a system where only by changing objects in Modeler, you automatically get them at the final scene, without touching anything else. As usual, LightWave's simplicity, and its excellent workflow organization helps tremendously to have everything perfectly under control.

Post-production was made in Fusion. We had to composite a lot of layers, as we made buffers of all kinds from Arnold. And besides, we rendered a couple of dirt layers in LightWave. All effects of DOF, motion blur, flares, glows, were added in post-production.