OPW/Tokheim Gas Station Fly-Throughs

OPW Fueling Components had merged with Tokheim, a French-based manufacturer of fuel dispensers. What we needed to create were 2 separate animations, showing gas stations incorporating both company's products in a single scene. Gas station layouts are different in Europe, hence the reason why we had to create 2 versions, each with their own set of dispensers/products. This job was a headache. My co-worker and I were at the mercy of our 2 mac pros (no slaves to render while we worked on other projects), so we had to set everything to render overnight before we left for the day. We created one version as a cell render, the other version as colored, along with 5-6 separate object buffers to lay over the top of one another and mask in after effects. The client made a lot of piece-mail changes, which required us to re-render everything pretty much daily until the final launch, which happened early in the morning. On top of the videos, there were static illustrations of these that we used for brochures, as well as a microsite. Keeping things consistent with the on-going changes was fun! All in all, it was a good team effort between my co-worker and I, and we made due with the amount of time we were given. There are a few things I'm still unhappy with, like some of the object buffers overlapping and looking as if they were vibrating. We also had to dumb the render settings down significantly to be able to render all frames overnight on our 2 computers.