This new 30-second animation from international media studio Kompost introduces Viggle

Viggle is a new smartphone app that collects redeemable points while customers watch their favourite television shows. Created for US digital TV provider DirecTV, Kompost came on board with the project after the company’s creative director approached the studio’s US representative, Duck.

“The guys at DirecTV wanted to work with us on this commercial,” says Kompost creative director Oliver Conrad. “They loved our style, and felt we were an exact match for the brief.” So the team went on to design, direct and animate all aspects of the ad, using Maya and Arnold to fully achieve this.

This was the first large project the team rendered completely in Arnold, and they weren’t disappointed by its capabilities. “No production depends on anything more than its renderer,” says Conrad. “We can put in weeks of time and energy into modelling, animation and surfacing, but all that goes down the drain if the final images are not produced on time and to a high standard. We chose Solid Angle’s Arnold because it simply gets the job done. Though this piece was not in a style usually associated with physical ray tracers, it was flexible enough to produce a highly stylised look without any problems.”

Discover 20 top free 3D models at our sister site, Creative Bloq.

The message ‘helping make dreams come true’ is brilliantly encapsulated in this new spot

Created by London-based independent production company and animation studio Nexus Productions, the 30-second ad features a young girl who dreams about the things most people take for granted in life: love, security and comfort.

Directed by Ben Hibon, the team was responsible for the overall design, animation and direction of the film. A fully CG spot, the team opted to use 3ds Max and Nuke to bring the narrative to life. “The most useful piece of software we used was the 3ds Max plug-in Hair Farm,” says CG supervisor Michael Greenwood. “It allowed us to model the girl’s hair to a very specific design from the director, then use the powerful simulation tools for animation of the hair. Nuke was also incredibly important to the production of this commercial, with look development being done from the start directly within the software,” he explains.

“The geometry from 3ds Max was very simple for all environment objects, which were imported into Nuke to project matte paintings onto. This allowed for relighting and effects work to happen all within Nuke. This kept our 3D render times relatively light, with the girl’s passes also put together in comp, changing the look completely from the original lighting and rendering.”

What’s next for Augmented Reality? Find out at our sister site, Creative Bloq.

Zeitguised used Cinema 4D and V-Ray in tandem to create this seamless spot for Banque Populaire

This most recent spot for French financial institution Banque Populaire created by visual art and graphics studio Zeitguised is all about seamless motion graphics. The fifth spot in a series created for the bank, Zeitguised became involved with the project after being approached by ad agency Euro RSCG and production company Stink. The team was responsible for the direction, design and production of the 25-second 3D animation, for which they used Cinema 4D and V-Ray. Here’s a making-of film you can watch on the spot.

Director of Zeitguised Henrik Mauler explains: “C4D lets us work creatively and openly. Many parts of the animation and modelling stay parametric and can be reshuffled, and are only collapsed for better handling in the renderer in the end. V-Ray gives us everything necessary to create a nice-quality GI look, while the render times are below that of the normal non-GI C4D renderer.”

The team also used third-party plug-ins to solve some of the project’s more complex issues. “The entire film is one camera moving around a bicycle without a rider,” says Mauler. “It’s all one take, and it’s one file that was rendered in the end. We used a lot of optimisation tricks, provided by third parties, our own programming scripts, and our intensive work-around experience to make this work.”

Discover 30 Cinema 4D tutorials to boost your skills over at Creative Bloq.

Take a trip around a 3D paper world in this new spot for marketing communications firm Keiler & Company

After receiving storyboards depicting a car travelling around a crumpled map, which unfolds as the spot progresses, the team at Texas-based visual design and postproduction company Impossible Engine started production on the complex project using Cinema 4D and a selection of third-party plug-ins.

Impossible Engine owner and creative director Scott Oliphant explains: “Besides C4D itself, the most useful piece of software was a plug-in called Control4D, which provided an interface between a PlayStation 3 controller and the car rig. We connected it up so that we could control the steering, breaking, accelerating and steering wheel. This allowed us to drive in real time over the terrain we built.”

The team relied on another plug-in to help them overcome a huge hurdle. “Probably the biggest challenge was the paper ball at the beginning,” says Oliphant. “The basic ideas came from crumpling real paper by hand, paying special attention to what our hands and fingers were doing. As much as we like using Cinema 4D, it leaves a little to be desired with regard to cloth self-collisions – especially for paper-thin geometry – and we ended up using a third-party plug-in called Uniflex that made the self-collisions manageable.”

Discover what’s next for Augmented Reality at our sister site, Creative Bloq.

Take a break from whatever you’re doing and get your socks blown off by Rob Redman’s Pick of the Week

As a 3D artist I am always keeping my eyes peeled for new artists, studios, or teams that provide that instant wow factor. I love nothing more than seeing an animation that makes me question how it was made and then spend some time figuring out possible techniques. It doesn’t matter if I don’t end up using the same tools or techniques as them. I still grow as an artist, which is something we should all strive for.

This particular piece had me wondering how things were done in just about every scene. There is an immense amount of work here. The storyboarding alone must have been quite a task. The plot may be a little contrived and obvious but the CG is top notch in a slightly stylised, rather than photoreal way. I can’t say much more except that it’s great and I will be spending some time picking over it to see what I can learn.

Have a good week

Rob

About the author

Long-time 3D artist Rob Redman has been working in the field of VFX and motion graphics for over a decade. He is Technical Editor on 3D World magazine.

Bath-based publisher (and home of 3D World magazine) – Future – has created a brilliant CG spot to promote the company’s upcoming Metal Hammer Golden God Awards

Produced entirely in-house, we caught up with Writer/Director Alun Pughe and Director of 3D Animation Dan Pearce to find out how the promo spot came about

3D World: What were the film’s influences, both story-wise and stylistically?

Alun Pughe: We did a lot of research in pre-production to ensure we were all on the same page. We agreed to stylise the look of the video to ensure the live action and the CGI melded. Influence wise we were aiming for an action film noir feel that happens to take place in a fantasy WWII sky battle so we looked at how they graded films such as Zach Snyder’s 300 and Sucker Punch before Dan brought in the graphic novel look which seemed perfect. We then pretty much studied every flight combat movie we could get our hands on (from Star Wars to Top Gun to shorts such as Paths of Hate and The German) to try and capture the excitement of cinematic dog fighting.

Dan Pearce: One of the sponsors for the Golden God event is World of Warplanes, which is an upcoming MMO game from the creators of World of Tanks. Our direction was to create an animation in the WW2 plane genre to which we would then add a heavy metal influence. From this we carefully chose aircraft that would complement the characters and storyline, and went from there.

3D World: What was the hardest job?

DP: The hardest job was trying to maintain consistency in lighting and general appearance between live action and CG.

3D World: How long did the animation take to produce?

DP: The whole piece took around three months to produce, however this time included extra parts which ended up being removed.

3D World: What 3D software did you use and why?

DP: We used 3ds Max 2013. I’ve been using 3ds Max for over 13 years so am very familiar with the workflow. It has excellent network rendering capabilities which allowed for an efficient rendering pipeline. The models were bought from TurboSquid and then modified with new textures and ancillaries to bring them into line with the style and look of what we wanted to create. We were limited to what was available for certain aircraft and had to tidy up two of the models as they had some importing issues making the meshes rather messy.

3D World: What was the most useful piece of 3D software and why?

DP: 3ds Max 2013 handled the high poly count well (circa 7 million) with its improved real time rendering, allowing for a smooth and stable workflow during production, which is of course very important.

3D World: What was the most impressive technical aspect of the project and how was it achieved using 3D software?

DP: I used 3ds Max’s excellent Crowd system to produce the swarm of 150 bandit planes near the end of the piece. It allowed me to maintain the parented propeller motion and randomise various aspects of the plane orientation and velocity to give the look I was after. Using 3ds Max’s ProOptimiser, I was able to reduce each plane from around 250k polys to 10k without to much visual degradation which worked great for distant instances, adding hi-poly versions when a foreground interest was needed.

3D World: Did you do anything wrong in the production?

DP: The scene scale gave some headaches. To achieve the correct look of motion blur on the propellers required the MB time samples to be around 10 (from the default value of 1). In some scenes the camera appeared to wobble and shudder when parented to an object. It was very frustrating and we tried all kinds of things to fix it. It’s something I’ve never seen before and after much deliberation found that the scale of the scene (which transpired to be pretty much the maximum that 3ds Max would allow) resulted in this problem unless the samples were reduced back to 1. It was a very strange ‘bug’ which only became apparent in this large scale environment. Tested in a smaller scene, the problem didn’t occur. However this was discovered late in the project so we had to work around it, as there wasn’t time to shrink everything down due to having many knock on effects.

3D World: Did you learn anything from producing it? Would you do anything differently if you had to produce it again?

DP: Make sure your 3D scene is a manageable physical scale, as at the upper limits of the program’s scene handling ability, anomalies occur. We wanted to add volumetric clouds later on and this too had problems in the huge scene.

3D World: Did you use or develop any new or notable techniques?

DP: We did look at the 3ds Max to After Effects Scene State linking in Max 2013 to added extra effects. It seemed to work very well however it didn’t get included as time didn’t allow us to refine what we had started. However now that it’s learnt, it’s definitely something to include for future productions.

Stockholm’s Naive studio needed a black belt in origami to make this epic spot for GE’s Vscan

Created to promote Vscan, General Electric’s new pocket-sized portable ultrasound scanner, this 60-second spot takes an epic sweep of history, making a connection between the invention of paper in Ancient China and today’s era of innovation in mobile technology.

Stockholm-based creative studio Naive got involved with the project after being approached by ad agency Acne on behalf of TBWA Shanghai.

“We were contacted about a campaign involving four films featuring GE as a multi-faceted company,” says CG supervisor Linus Kullman. “We originally considered producing all of them, but in the end four different studios took one each.”

The Naive team was in charge of every aspect of production on the Curing spot, relying largely on Maya. “The robustness and versatility of Maya made sure we could deliver on the short timescale we had,” says Kullman.

This meant the team also had to devise time-saving ways to deal with the most technically challenging part of the project: the folding animations. “The more complicated folds required some pretty detailed planning, but mostly we had to improvise on the fly,” Kullman explains. “Almost all folds were achieved through bone rigging.”

Discover 10 beautiful examples of paper art at our sister site, Creative Bloq.

How The Moving Picture Company filled Acer’s giant fish tanks with simulated sealife

Taiwanese electronics giant Acer’s recent spots have featured celebrities behaving totally out of character: its latest stars actress Megan Fox as a dolphin expert. To coincide with the ads, Acer set up some life-sized aquatic stands in shopping centres across Europe and commissioned VFX facility The Moving Picture Company to create a two-minute film, in which a CG dolphin would seemingly interact with passers-by.

Working alongside ad agency Mother and director FX Goby, the team at MPC created a photoreal dolphin and fish, swimming in a giant tank with dynamic seabed and caustic lighting effects. “The sea creatures were built using Maya, Mudbox, ZBrush and Photoshop,” says VFX supervisor Mark Gregory. “The seaweed was made using Maya’s Paint Effects, which was very effective for applying loopable movement to the seabed. Maya’s fluids and particles were used to create the dirt in the water, while Maya’s nCloth and nParticles were used to create the bubbles.”

MPC’s massive photoreal screens gave the appearance of a real dolphin tank

Discover 20 brilliant 3D artists to follow on Behance, over at Creative Bloq.

Spyro the dragon leads an army of Skylanders to take on the evil Chaos in this latest trailer for the videogame. The New York-based animation studio PandaPanther was approached by design and advertising agency 72andSunny with a script that already had a clear direction of content, style and feel.

Skylanders “Spyro’s Adventure” from PandaPanther on Vimeo.

PandaPanther was then responsible for the entire animated portion of the spot. The characters had already been created for the game by games publisher Activision, but the team polished them into cinema-worthy representations.

“Maya was such a great tool for creating a variety of effects, such as the fire and water,” says creative director and co-founder of PandaPanther Jonathan Garin. “The software also allowed us to create the illusion of thousands of soldiers running on the battlefield, without having to animate them all individually.

There was a process of instancing and cloning, where a set of soldiers was spread across a particle system with some built-in physics to make it behave as if they were running and weaving through the battle.”

See the best new 3D spots every month

We hope you’ve enjoyed viewing these awesome commercials by fellow 3D artists.

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Have you worked on a cool CG spot? Want to see your work in 3D World?

If you would like to see your studio’s work featured in 3D World, email us, attaching low-res images from the commercial and brief technical details of the project.
enquiries@3dworldmag.com

There’s prehistoric peril running rampant in the kitchens, in this Jurassic Park-inspired spot for Crunchy Nut Cornflakes

When a bloodthirsty dinosaur invades an industrial kitchen, two terrified chefs attempt to hide, but are rumbled by the unmistakable crunch of an irresistible bowl of Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. The brief to create the CG dinosaur was given to VFX facility Framestore by ad agency Leo Burnett. After years of creating CG prehistoric creatures for series such as Dinotopia and Walking with Beasts, Framestore drew on its experience to create the believable model.

CG supervisor Alex Doyle created a unique species in the form of concept art, which was presented to the client. Once approved, Doyle and lead modeller Mary Swinnerton turned the 2D design into 3D using Maya, ZBrush and Mari.

“ZBrush was used initially for defining large details such as muscles and folds in the skin,” Doyle explains. “On top of this, ZBrush was the perfect tool for creating the tiny skin details. Mary used a very traditional method of sculpting, mostly with the Clay brush. A very useful trick was to use the Mask by Cavity function, then export this as a map to use as a layer in the texture.”

Discover the best 3D movies of 2013 at our sister site, Creative Bloq.