100 Biggest Weather Moments

Eddie Terrell, senior design specialist for The Weather Channel, said creating the show package for the special, "100 Biggest Weather Moments", was a breeze with CINEMA 4D.

This project was simultaneously Terrill's first creation with CINEMA 4D and his first in HD. This daunting 100% 3D project was comprised of 200 3D animations including title frames, countdown frames, the opening, bumpers and lower thirds.

The "100 Biggest Weather Moments" was a big project on many fronts taking approximately ten months to complete, from storyboard concepts to deliverables. The CINEMA 4D Studio Bundle on Macintosh computers made easy work of this challenging task for the design team. Most of the animation files ranged from 500 MB to 20 GB, with the opening sequence alone weighing in at around 6 GB. Terrill chose to render uncompressed files, necessitating longer render times but ensuring image quality and integrity, resulting in flexibility for future file conversions.

Adding to the creative challenges was a tight deadline requiring the creation of the last fifty to sixty shots between the Christmas and New Year holidays. The technical challenges included working in the HD format with its huge requirements for memory and storage. HD rendering can take up to four times longer than SD and this project required the use of three computers running MAXON's Net Render to finish on time and on budget.



Terrill and Senior Designer Marco Rodriguez implemented CINEMA 4D to create a sweeping landscape using a camera path that evoked visions of an "earth re-entry" from an orbital perspective. The predominantly fantasy-style imagery they created was meant to convey a larger-than-life sense of proportion with big numbers for the countdown, a top-down view of a hurricane and Terrill's favorite effect of sun rays, created using CINEMA 4D's volumetric lights, meant to emulate Hollywood searchlights. This effort was complimented with an epic score to join the audio and visual intention of a huge event.

Terrill credits CINEMA 4D's easy to learn interface for a very flat learning curve for him and his team. He cites the unparalleled integration with After Effects as a key benefit:

"The CINEMA 4D interface was easy to navigate, worked seamlessly with Adobe After Effects, and the renderer was extremely stable. In fact, I sometimes start a CINEMA 4D render on Friday night, maybe come in on the weekend to check on it, and when I come to work on Monday, it's completed. It's never failed me", says Terrill.

Other projects completed by the creative team at The Weather Channel include the opening for the weekly "Forecast Earth" for which Terrill and his team created all elements using CINEMA 4D, except the videotaped Glacier caving scene. CINEMA 4D was also used for the creation of "Epic Conditions", "Weather Ventures", and the "Ski Week" Intro.


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