How Taylor James recreated Pegasus for a print campaign

Kerrie Hughes | Commercial | Showcase | 20/03/2012 11:49am

Check out this beautiful winged horse made out of 3D mobile phones and find out how Taylor James reared this mythological creature for Huawei

This stunning 3D Pegasus was recently created by London-based creative production studio Taylor James, using thousands of one model of mobile phone for global telecom solutions company Huawei. The ‘Ascend’ mobile device was designed and built from scratch to ensure the way they were structured together fully emphasized the horse’s body shape and form.

Taylor James was responsible for the CGI of the print campaign, which involved detailed modelling of the phone from a physical reference, texturing and shading, covering the Pegasus in phones before lighting, rendering and composition in Photoshop. “We produced one image of the Pegasus and two product shots of the phone in eight days,” says 3D technical lead and R&D lead David Wortley.

Once the phone had been modelled and positions specified, Taylor James swapped out the proxy low-res phone models, switched to a high-res 20,000 poly version, which, with over 2,000 phones making up the structure of the Pegasus, meant there were over 40 million polygons in the scene

Creating custom software solutions

The team used a 3ds Max and V-Ray pipeline, with Photoshop used for post-production. “We use 3ds Max as it’s very good for this sort of work where we need to adapt and create tools quickly for the job in hand,” says Wortley. “To get the right flow and placement of the phones of the body and the wings, we used a couple of scripts we’ve developed on previous projects and wrote a small tool to help with the alignment. But even with these there was a fair bit of manual clean up, tidying and intersecting geometry.”

3ds Max and V-Ray also managed the scale of the project competently. “The most impressive part of this project is the sheer number and detail of the phones,” Wortley says. “Using V-Ray proxies we were able to render 40million polygons at 8000 pixels high resolution without any hassle. Each phone was highly detailed, even the lens in the camera was modelled which gives just a subtle bit of variation that really helps make it seem real. The biggest challenge was definitely lighting it, as the surface is so faceted we had to model curved lights and make some clever render passes to allow comp to get a nice rim-lit lighting effect.”

The print image was recently displayed throughout the 2012 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and can also be seen around the UK.

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Check out the best 3D movies of 2012 on our sister site Creative Bloq.

Posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2012 at 11:49 am under Commercial, Showcase. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.