Ergomen on Ice

He can do a flawless quadruple toe loop in men’s figure skating. He’s also an expert Alpine skier who can land the perfect ski jump. On top of that, he’s an extreme speed skater.

But when he makes his appearance at the 1998 Olympic Winter Games, which begin Friday in Nagano, Japan, medal contenders needn’t worry. Ergoman will display his winning form only in cyberspace.

As one of the computer-animated visuals CBS Sports will use during its broadcast of the Nagano Games, Ergoman may distinguish himself in yet another arena--as part of what may be the most ambitious display of digital imagery ever to cross the airwaves.

“A package of this length, running with the kind of frequency and worldwide viewing that the Olympics is going to get . . . is probably the most extensive dissemination of computer animation from one source that we’ve ever seen,” said Robi Roncarelli, a computer animation industry analyst.

In collaboration with Los Angeles-based Rez.n8 Productions, a leading design and computer animation house, CBS has developed a digitally modeled, three-dimensional action sequence for nearly every event in the Games--about 20 in all. Each competition venue was re-created in detail, then animated to give viewers a glimpse of the challenges faced by the athletes.

The sequences will be used primarily in pre-produced features before each event. In some cases, commentators will use excerpts during live coverage to point out the strengths and weaknesses of an athlete’s performance.

“This is the biggest television event that there is . . . and a very key and significant part of that presentation is how we help people understand what’s going on,” said Douglas E. Towey, creative director for CBS Sports. “That is the key to what the graphics are doing.”

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This is the third time Rez.n8 has worked with CBS to produce graphics for the Winter Olympics. The animation firm, which just marked its 10th anniversary, has won several Emmy awards for its Olympics design work and for Fox Sports’ NFL graphics, as well as numerous industry awards.

Rez.n8’s client list includes NBC, Fox, CNN, Warner Bros., Paramount and ABC and its parent, Walt Disney. In addition to live broadcast packages, the company produces computer-generated visual effects for films, commercials, movie trailers. It also designs corporate logos, titles and Web sites.

To create this year’s Olympics graphics package, Rez.n8’s designers combined motion capture, the tracking of human movement in real time; digital imaging, the creation of a three-dimensional object or environment; and computer animation, manipulating a virtual object or environment.

“Some of this technology has been around,” said Paul Sidlo, Rez.n8’s founder and president. “It’s just that the application of it in a very well-executed medium where the quality and design level is very high . . . is new to television sports.”

Neither CBS nor Rez.n8 would disclose the budget for the project, but they say the Nagano broadcast contains about 90 minutes of high-end, three-dimensional animation--twice the amount used during coverage of the Lillehammer Games four years ago.

Roncarelli, who had not yet seen the new graphics, said animation of this caliber can cost more than $5,000 per minute and that the total cost of the package could exceed $1 million.

But that’s just part of the price tag. Add to that the costs of designing the artistic look and style of the presentation; preparing standard “content graphics” for sports, such as two-dimensional scoring grids and panels for the athletes’ standings; and installing and staffing a powerful computer-animation facility in Nagano for the three-week duration of the Games.

The star of the graphics package, Ergoman, was inspired by the men’s figure-skating event, where one jump in particular--the quadruple toe loop, or “quad”--is expected to play a major role in determining the medalists. The quad requires a skater to make four revolutions in the air in less than a second, then land on one foot.

CBS figure-skating event producer Robert Dustin had been looking for an innovative way to convey the complexity of the jump two years ago. Then he saw the film “Toy Story.” Impressed, he brought the visual concept to CBS.

“We decided this would be the cutting-edge technology to try and do something totally different,” Dustin said.

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Last summer at the North Hills Iceoplex skating rink, Dustin’s vision began to take shape. Czech figure skater Jozef Sabovcik, the 1984 Olympic Bronze medalist, was recruited to serve as the model.

The first step was to re-create the quadruple toe loop with motion-capture technology. About two dozen sensors were attached to Sabovcik’s body, and eight infrared cameras videotaped him as he performed the jump. The data were fed into a computer and the image was animated.

The technology allows animators to show the virtual jump from various angles: from 360 degrees around the skater, from the air, even from beneath the ice.

“With the quad being kind of a story at this Olympics, I hope this will give people a better understanding of what happens on the ice,” said CBS Sports analyst Scott Hamilton, who won a gold medal in men’s figure skating at the 1984 games in Sarajevo.

The CBS staff developed its concept for the downhill-skiing event by toying with a video game at a penny arcade.

“The graphics were kind of low-tech, but there was the sense and feeling that you were actually on the course with the steepness and the speed,” Dustin said.

To capture the feel of a downhill ski race, Rez.n8 entered into a computer a comprehensive topography of the mountain Happo’one, compiled from high-speed film, course maps with elevations, and helicopter and digital satellite photos. The result is a virtual-reality environment that allows viewers to experience the course as a skier would.

For the bobsled event, a virtual track has been created that will allow viewers to see the course as the athlete does. In addition, a laser-beam trajectory line will trace a team’s ideal run.

In these and other sequences, Rez.n8 designers used “environmental graphics” in which aspects of the sports are built into the visual landscape of the animation itself. For example, the downhill piece has a three-dimensional cutaway that illustrates the steepness of the grade.

“It makes the viewer feel as though the graphics are not some secondary element on a layer on-screen, but they are actually in the scene,” said Dale Hergistad, Rez.n8’s Olympics art director.

However, some of the most significant new technologies take place behind the scenes, invisible to the viewing audience.

Sidlo said a key issue facing the computer animation industry is how to manage a mass of graphic elements that is constantly growing bigger and more complex.

“If you have thousands of elements, just keeping track of where [they] are is an important part of managing the event so you can . . . recall that information at your fingertips,” Sidlo said.

For Rez.n8, this means developing its own software that permits different animation formats to quickly integrate and interact with one another. In addition, the company uses a hardware system with the computing power of 150 microprocessors.

And tomorrow may be a very different story.

“In the not-so-distant future . . . the Web will reach the same kind of standard presentation level that television has today,” Sidlo said. “The next Winter Olympic Games could be a multi-threaded feed of every venue live, and you could plug into the . . . subject that you are interested in.”

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Susanne Gayle Harris is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.