1K Project II. 1000 cars racing at once.
September 3, 2006 5:20 AM   Subscribe

1K Project II. 1000 cars racing at the same time in Trackmania Sunrise [via waxy].
posted by srboisvert (32 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I think it's fake. Probably part of some viral marketing campaign.
posted by Kibbutz at 6:15 AM on September 3, 2006


Actually, I quite enjoyed it. Thank you.
posted by Kibbutz at 6:15 AM on September 3, 2006


Music?
posted by Mid at 6:16 AM on September 3, 2006


What is Trackmania Sunrise? Very cool to watch, at any rate.
posted by antifuse at 6:22 AM on September 3, 2006


Mid: Flower, by Moby.
posted by matthewr at 6:23 AM on September 3, 2006


Well that's definetly not like anything I've seen, or even imagined before.

Was it really done in real time?
posted by delmoi at 6:32 AM on September 3, 2006


Sort of a porno version of Cars®
posted by hal9k at 6:41 AM on September 3, 2006


No, delmoi, I think it was run seperately 1000 times with one car and then the replays were overlaid. You can see that collisions between cars aren't detected, which suggests the cars aren't being rendered at the same time.

There's also the 3K project - poorer quality, though.
posted by matthewr at 6:51 AM on September 3, 2006


You can see that collisions between cars aren't detected, which suggests the cars aren't being rendered at the same time.

Or that collision detection was turned off. In fact, what you described is impossible, since the cars clip each other. Besides, composing 1000 videos with z-buffer (required for clipping) would take a lot longer then simply doing a 3-d video.

What I meant by "real time" was whether each frame actually took only 1/30th of a second to render, or if more time was used per frame.
posted by delmoi at 7:07 AM on September 3, 2006


I think Trackmania has a render-in-not-real-time function.
posted by 6am at 7:11 AM on September 3, 2006


Anyone want to take my bet that we'll see this idea in an actual car commercial before March next year... except that at the end all the cars will merge into a single car for the product-shot?

Bear witness: I Have Called It.

(I also note that in the UK Vauxhall (I think it's Vauxhall but I don't care, really) has comprehensively stolen the idea behind these Isuzu commercials except they've done them with CGI, which renders the whole thing pointless. Idiot vulture bastards.)
posted by Hogshead at 7:12 AM on September 3, 2006 [1 favorite]


I don't know how exactly it was done, but I think it's likely that all 1000 cars were indeed rendered at once at whatever speed the PC (all of the Trackmanias are PC games) could handle, and the result was just made into a normal-speed movie.

Regarding collision detection - I don't think any of the Trackmanias have car-to-car collisions, ever (that's what the Wikipedia page says, anyway). You can race against other people, but you can't bounce off them.
posted by dansdata at 7:19 AM on September 3, 2006


It sounds like the "overlay" effect would take place before the render. By render I mean converting 3d polygons into a two dimensional image. You can combine, or overlay, lots of datasets before rendering.
posted by delmoi at 7:53 AM on September 3, 2006


I think it's fake.

What would that mean, in the context of a video of fictional cars driving on a fictional race track? How could this be anything but fake?
posted by cortex at 7:58 AM on September 3, 2006


That was pretty. Reminded me somewhat of the boucy-balls-in-SF commercial (optimo? some camera, anyway). However, some more damage would have looked cooler, as would a big photo finish at the end.
posted by craven_morhead at 8:19 AM on September 3, 2006


Delmoi: From what I've gathered from the Kotaku thread (where I first saw it), basically, in Trackmania you can record a run, and then turn on "ghost car", where when you race the track, your stored run is played at the same time (i.e. like if you were playing against a computer opponent, like in most race games). So you're really driving in real time, and at the same time it's playing back your past run as an NPC car. Presumably, either you can playback multiple runs simultaneously, or stack them, or you can do so with some hacking.
posted by Bugbread at 8:20 AM on September 3, 2006


Anyone else reminded of monarch butterfly migration?
posted by RichardP at 8:27 AM on September 3, 2006


My associations: herds of wildebeest, or Siggraph demos of early particle systems, beautiful all the way.

The 3K one was terrible. Music and editing got in the way of the goods.
posted by migurski at 8:41 AM on September 3, 2006


cortex: Kibbutz is joking on this
posted by O9scar at 9:31 AM on September 3, 2006


the 3k one really was super terrible, but in the little note for the video from the uploader on the right, he says that these are from back in October 2005!
posted by blasdelf at 9:41 AM on September 3, 2006


Anyone else reminded of monarch butterfly migration?

I thought of lemmings ...
posted by carter at 9:57 AM on September 3, 2006


Me likey.
posted by dersins at 10:19 AM on September 3, 2006


It actually reminded me of Cai Guo-Giang's exhibit "Head On".
posted by jonson at 10:22 AM on September 3, 2006


It's a fantastic video; if I were the publisher of the TMS series I would ask this guy to do a promo video for the sequel.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 11:12 AM on September 3, 2006


I thought it was really cool, except for the choice of camera angles and editing, which I often found jarring and frustrating. The sequence looked like it would have worked wonderfully if they'd made more of the flow aspect, cutting into action occasionally rather than constantly, to allow space to appreciate the whole thing.
posted by MetaMonkey at 1:06 PM on September 3, 2006


So...the yellow one won?
posted by mygoditsbob at 4:25 PM on September 3, 2006


Pardon my caps, but TRY THE TRACKMANIA SERIES.

Here's a free version they did as a promo: http://www.trackmanianations.com/indexUk.php

Trackmania Sunrise is even better. It's not unlike mini-golf with cars. Replace the soundtrack .OGG files in the game's data directory with your driving music for maximum effect.
posted by krilli at 6:33 PM on September 3, 2006


The Trackmania games have Starforce copy protection built in (even the free one, apparently, which is certifiably batshitinsane). Your system may catch fire, explode and give herpes to your dog. Exercise caution.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:14 PM on September 3, 2006


Rush hour in DC.
posted by crunchland at 10:41 PM on September 4, 2006


Wonderful.
posted by squirrel at 10:42 PM on September 4, 2006


I remember doing this back in the 70s... with Hotwheels, a whole lot of track and a set of stairs at a friend's house. Oh, ye Gods how I wanted to live in a house with stairs!

But our camera angles and cut scenes weren't nearly as polished. In fact if you got down on your hands and knees and tried to get a real nice view you'd probably lose your eyeballs to the blunt force trauma of a tiny, fast moving river of steel and wheels.
posted by loquacious at 11:54 PM on September 4, 2006


I remember one reviewer of the chase scene in Matrix: Reloaded compared the cars to dolphins cavorting around. This is another wonderful surrealistic touch.
posted by cowbellemoo at 6:26 AM on September 5, 2006


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