The production of "Rip Through the Rule Book" began even before the real car was finished, so a lot of details such as the position of advertising partners' stickers kept changing. As the rigging of the car got more and more complex over time (with the whole character rig of the drivers being controlled by it, as well as secondary animation and manual overrides), we needed an easy-to-use and fast system to apply the rig to revisions of car geometry and textures. Once again, Cinema 4D's XPresso in conjunction with custom User Data solved the problem for us. All the animation controls were put on a separate NullObject that could be easily linked to any car present in a scene, thus making it a two-second job to switch the car with a newer version.


"During the production of this animation we came to appreciate XPresso even more than we already did. Without the presence of a such well-integrated node-based scripting language that can control each and every function in Cinema 4D, this project would have been virtually impossible to do" says Manuel Casasola Merkle, managing director of AixSponza. "XPresso offers unsurpassed access to all areas of the program and offers us the possibility to give every artist just what he or she needs. Animators get clean User Data for animation, the CAD team can build up the car geometry without having to worry about the rigging and TDs are able to delve into mathematics without having to worry how to apply revised shaders. That is true flexibility."