Taylor James reveals how the studio created its striking images in recent print campaign for KME in which it sculpted some complicated full-CG scenes.
These series of images represent the latest collaboration between Taylor James and TBWA\Italy for KME, manufacturer of semi-finished copper and copper alloy.
The aim of the spot was to illustrate the versatility of the products with five different themes: design, energy, comfort, idea and protection.
Taylor James was able to generate a detailed design of the gallery environment illuminated by a copper-sculpted house showing the transition from melted copper forming different objects in conjunction with the five themes.
As the space in which the copper structures sit are generally clean and uncomplicated, particularly the expansive white ceiling, the studio had to employ various tricks to make the metallic copper surfaces aesthetically pleasing.
“We rendered a number of additional passes using HDRI maps and other more complex environments,” explains Ed Taylor, creative lead at Taylor James. “Then using mask passes, our in-house retouch team used Photoshop to isolate areas of the sculpture to carefully control and overlay this extra detail to ‘cheat’ where required and add a few ‘fake’ reflections to our metallic surfaces.”
The studio worked on the project from first sketches to composite. Using a pipeline of 3ds Max, V-Ray, Fusion and Photohop, Taylor James worked had to make best use of its tools due to highly condensed schedule in which there was little time for error of experimentation.
“V-Ray’s Distributed Rendering feature enabled us to harness our render farm to swiftly test shaders and balance lighting, avoiding excessive thumb-twiddling to see results,” says Taylor.
As a print campaign, the hi-resolution images required meant focus was needed, particularly in creating an 8k floor. Considerable detail in grain, wear and scratches were needed so that the foreground help up to the high-res render.
The studio solved this by going back to basics, collecting a number of individual photographic floors and planks of oak, picking the best and most uniform, before fixing the lighting gradients in Photoshop and removing obvious knots and focal points.
Using this toolkit of planks, the floor was then rebuilt in 2D, flipping and turning the selected planks to ensure they all looked unique.
“To further disguise repetition, reflection and bump maps conveying scratches and wear were laid across the floor using differently angled and sized UVW maps, which would never align to one another or the diffuse tile,” explains Taylor.
“The variety provided by the scratches and reflection helped disguise any repeat in diffuse, and eventually we had a seamless plank floor map that could be adjusted to give any hue of oak floor we needed.”
Visit the Taylor James website for more examples of great CGI and print campaign work.
Posted on Friday, January 28th, 2011 at 9:00 am under Showcase, Visualisation. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: Illustration, Print campaign, Taylor James
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