I had a few days off recently, so I decided to tackle a modeling/animation project that’s been in my head for a few months. I’ve always loved looking at these huge JumboTrons that hang down from the ceiling in the center of sports arenas. These fascinate me. They’re really complex, insect-like, and provide spectators in-the-round with live information about the game. Basically, these JumboTrons are like cylindrical stage shows, boasting absolutely huge screens, moving lighting arrays and enormous speakers. I think most people don’t even realize how involved these things are, not to mention the team of talented people it takes to run them!
Anyway, I thought it would be fun to build the basic parts of a JumboTron and a stadium and see if I could bring them to life.
I started in Cinema4D by making a simple set of stairs, floors, and seats. Each seat is a clone of the first, so if I need to change anything about the seats, I can just make those changes to the first
The next step was modeling the main JumboTron screen array. Really I just had to build 1 of the 4 screens because I planned on using Element 3D for cloning. The big green rectangle became the “Main” screen, while the lower thin aqua rectangle became the scoreboard. I also added some lighting truss bars at the bottom
Once in the Element3D interface, I started cloning and stacking up the seat sections. I also built a ceiling section. Shown here are the seating sections in their raw form, meaning they are straight. Later, in AfterEffects, I used Element’s ability to bend the section into part of a circle. This was cloned in a Ring replicator about 12 times
The JumboTron started to really take shape once in Element. I added a few cylinders to the top with down-facing lights, and an upper array of 8 screens to display player stats. The spot lights at the bottom were added as well. Each major part of this structure was also assigned an auxiliary channel for individual animation. For instance, the spot lights need to move and rotate independently, so I put them on Channel 4 so I could control them in Ae later on. The top stat screen octagon was on another channel, which allowed me to rotate it as well
Back in After Effects, I worked on making pre-comps for actual screen content. There are 5 different comps: Main screen, Scoreboard, Stat Screens, Make Some Noise banner, and the Canadian Flag. These all get mapped to the screen surfaces of the Element3D layer. There’s also lots of work involved to get the glow, illumination and fog values to look realistic for the scene
Here’s a screenshot from the final animation. Some very careful color correction was applied, along with optical flares and a little extra glow. Check out the final animation to see it come to life!
