SWAY Studio and Subaru

 

Reflections from a window off the front of the Subaru Impreza and background psychedelic animation, all created with NVIDIA Quadro, give the commercial a distinctive and impressive look.

SWAY studio, a leading Los Angeles-based visual effects studio, was contracted to produce the CG effects for Peel Out. The new Subaru commercial features images of a couple who peel themselves from the pages of a magazine, climb into the seats of a Subaru Impreza, and journey across a living-room table and through the countryside. The 30-second spot alternates between CG and live-action shots, taking the viewer on a creative ride.

Due to the large number of images needed to create the commercial, SWAY used a large number of textures to differentiate each image from the others and create a seamless and unified look and feel. The sheer volume and size of the texture files would have normally required excessive swapping of data from memory, resulting in system slow downs. To meet the production schedule, SWAY needed large frame buffers to speed the process.

The live-action couple driving into a CG magazine page. All the textures used in the shot could be loaded into the NVIDIA Quadro frame buffer.

Enter NVIDIA Quadro® with its large frame buffers, which gave SWAY the ability to upload all the different textures at once and work with the entire heavily textured scene in real time. With all the textures in memory, the director and effects supervisor could visualize and plan the shots precisely and on the fly, saving countless hours of production time.

NVIDIA Quadro professional GPUs formed the basis for an integrated production pipeline that also featured Autodesk 3ds Max for animation, Combustion for graphics, Nuke and Flame for compositing, and V-Ray for rendering.

“NVIDIA Quadro FX 4400 increased our productivity by providing a streamlined and seamless display of our work,” says Mark Glaser, owner and creative director of SWAY. “This saved us valuable time by not having to think about the amount of data we are working with. The time saved by NVIDIA, is time we used to improve the precision and detail of the final commercial.”

NVIDIA has produced Quadro boards with frame buffers as large as 1.5 GB, allowing large, detailed, and precise textures to be used for the highest-quality, real-time graphics.

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