Rushes reveal modelling work on ‘Building The Impossible’

Rushes have revealed their involvement in the forthcoming BBC series ‘Building The Impossible’.
Each week a regular two-person team - one engineer, one material scientist - takes on an engineering challenge from the past, using the knowledge and technology of the time. The catch is that although there may be historical references to what they are trying to build, the objects may never have actually existed before - the team really must ‘build the impossible’.
In each of these four programmes, the ‘build’ will provide us with a genuinely exciting test as the climax. The world’s first submarine, a monstrous Roman catapult, the earliest airship, designed but never built, and the burial shaft the Egyptians developed to try to foil the tomb raiders.
At Rushes Post Production, the 3D team have been busy creating historically accurate recreations of two of these machines, a Roman catapult capable of hurling a 26kg boulder over a hundred yards and an 18th century French airship that was over 250 feet long.
Rushes Rick Leary said: “To achieve this, we made extremely detailed models of each machine in Maya, working in close collaboration with the engineers and historians associated with the project in order to ensure historical accuracy. The work also involved using Maya Paint FX, creating computer generated people and raytracing on ART’s PURE PCI rendering cards installed in NT racks. The final product is a very stylised look that works perfectly and gives it a seamless finish.”
The series will be on air late 2002.
(GB)