Tracking Santa Across the Globe

Millions followed Santa's flight across the globe on Christmas Eve 2008 on MSNBC, or visited Santa's Village on the lead up to that big night. Visitors were able to see all this in 3D on Virtual Earth, thanks to models made in trueSpace by Heidi Simonsen, Stephen May, Augusto Michelis and Matthew Collins under the guiding hand of Tom Grimes, with the final page coding done by Chris Pendleton.

Santa's village as seen on Virtual Earth in the week leading up to Christmas Eve.

trueSpace users also got to experience the Village first hand in trueSpace itself, with the final Thursday Night Live! of 2008 being hosted in that festive setting. Now that the dust - or snow, rather - has settled, we spoke to the four artists involved in creating the models for the scene.

Getting started

Creating a model to be used in Virtual Earth is much like creating any other model. However, since it is to be used in a real-time environment, and the models need to download across the internet, it is important to work toward a more low-poly mesh than when modeling for conventional 3D "offline" renders.

"Personally the biggest challenge was forcing myself to use much lower polygon counts and more composite texture maps than I was used to. " said 3D artist Stephen May.

All the artists managed to make that shift though, cramming in a lot of detail to their models while keeping polygon counts and textures as small as possible.

Santa's village seen from the air in Virtual Earth

 

Mr and Mrs Claus in discussion with an elf in trueSpace.

Keeping in touch

During the development of the scene, a shared space was used so that all the artists working on it could co-ordinate their work with each other. This online environment acted as a place to bring the separate models together and make sure they were working as a complete village, and making it easy for the artists to share comments and ideas on their work.

Stephen commented that "being able to try out the bits I made with the bits others had made in Shared Space was super cool.  It allowed me to see what would fit with what and allowed me to design my models more easily."

Heidi Simonsen agreed that the team element was the best part of the project: "The most rewarding part of the project was that everyone worked together to make it a success. One of the best things about a team project is the opportunity to learn new approaches and techniques from each other. I’d never done a diorama until I saw how Stephen did it, and Matt’s materials enabled us to have the forest of trees"

Augusto Michelis liked the use of the scene for the final Thursday Night Live! of the year, when the trueSpace community gathered together live in the shared space. "It was a very fun project, but the best part of all was fooling around with my friends on the live Christmas server!" he said.

Bringing it to life

The final page was put together by Virtual Earth evangelist Chris Pendleton, who coded the scripting necessary to move Santa and his sleigh around the globe depending on the time of day. One of the 3D artists, Matthew Collins is quite involved with scripting for trueSpace, so naturally he was intrigued by this Virtual Earth equivalent.

"The ability to load up 3d models into Virtual Earth based on scripted conditions is quite interesting," Matthew said. "It really allows for the creation of very personalized, dynamic Virtual Earth web pages. I look forward to seeing how others use this ability in the future and anticipate experimenting with it more myself!"

Santa's reindeer relaxing before the big night, in trueSpace.

Skeleton in the closet

Heidi found another feature of trueSpace to be invaluable, since this scene had to include characters and animals rather than just buildings and rigid objects. "Even though this project didn’t involve any animation, I used the bones and IK system for creating poses for the different characters," she said. "That way I could focus on just modeling the basic character, knowing that I could position it later."

The results are in

The final page at MSNBC went on to receive millions of visitors, and hopefully brought a bit of Christmas fun and cheer into their web browsing. Our thanks to artists Heidi Simonsen, Stephen May, Matthew Collins and Augusto Michelis for their work in constructing this lovely scene. Keep an eye out next year to see what Virtual Earth and trueSpace have to offer in the way of following Santa over the holiday season!

Read more, including a walk-through of the web page code used for the Santa Tracker, at the Virtual Earth Blog.