With the Olympics in Italy, Antholz was chosen as the venue for the biathlon events. What set out as a simple idea turned into a crazy amount of “work” to create a 3D modelled environment of the venue that can be used for animations.
Although not completely new to Blender, an incredible tool for 3D modelling, animation, and manny more things, turning the real world into a 3D modelled environment was a bit beyond my less than a year experience with the tool. But in the end I’m very happy with the final result. (sorry, I’m unable to embed for some reason)
This post is mostly to share the final video and some thought on the process.
- getting to know Blender – check(-ish)
- make a plan on how to approach this logically – nope
- work on single items in random order – check!
This I have a tendency to see working with software as a battle of “I know it can be done, so I’m going to make it happen”, even if it takes me way longer than it should and I don’t even need it per se. Good example is the first past of the animation, where we start in a helicopter to do a fly-over of the environment. I didn’t plan on including a fly-over, but somehow got side-tracked with camera’s following a trajectory, and before I knew it I spent way too many hours on it; too many to not include in the final video.
Environment / backdrop
I was able to download a Digital Elevation Model of the area from the Italian mapping agency and convert it into a 3D model as the basis for the whole thing. I added the lake part manually to give it some depth (only to cover in snow later on). I then spent too much time on overlaying a map to show the treed areas without any good results, so I ended up manually assigning certain areas to a vector group of ground that should have trees. And I created a UV map that I then coloured/painted in Affinity, a Photoshop alternative, to give the mountains and valley some colour and depth.
Elements on the environment
It took me a while to get a hang of the Geometry Nodes, but once I did I realized how amazing they are. Basically, I created a couple of tree models and used the geonodes to randomly place them on the areas I assigned earlier in a vector group. You can provide a range for scale, rotation, etc. so the trees never look the same.
Then I started with the buildings in the arena, which in most cases were not your typical rectangular models. But creating them and finding the right textures (basically the wall cover on the outside) was something I enjoyed, although again took me longer than it should. The giant tv-screens in the stadium turned out well I thought.
Some of the stands and finish zone were fairly easy, and for the light masts I used an existing model which included the lighting, which was another topic I took some time with later on.
Final touch were some Olympic features, that make more sense when I added the next items: infrastructure, in the broad term. Roads, ski track, ski track cones/dividers, bridges, and some iconic buildings.
Next up, the crowds with flags. I loved this part, again taking advantage of the geonodes. Combined with the trees did make it all look a lot more lively, even with the people just being little sausages! Adding the trees made it even better, although now looking at it the scale is a bit off. Oh well.
Lastly, I needed the range and all items that go with that: target box, numbering, windfalls, dividers, firing line, etc. And all based on the official IBU rules, as I want to use this for training purposes as well.
When that was all done I spent the rest of the day”project” on lighting, camera work, animation, rendering, adding sound (which required looking up videos with audio I liked, clipping, mixing, etc.), bringing it all together and exporting it to the video linked above.
Was I in over my head? Absolutely. Did I learn a ton about Blender and animation in general? Absolutely too! So all in all a great project and I’m very happy with the result. I hope to later use it more for training purposes, and know that I have a better idea of the whole workflow I may add some other venues in the future (Canmore?).
