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IT'S ART : Can you speak about the initial brief?

James Neale : Over the past few years, we've established a good working rapport with both the agency and client on this job, having done a lot of illustration work for their instore posters and promotional needs.

The agency usually deals with print and packaging, but they developed an idea for a new shoe product which was closely tied with Nickelodeon and their slime device. The new shoe was called Slimers and the agency asked us our thoughts on doing something animated with slime. We obviously jumped at the chance.

After doing some initial R&D on what we could and couldn't achieve, we sent them some tests and had a few pre-production conversations with them by phone to explain our process. The agency then worked with us to develop a storyboard which was within the realms of our capabilities as a studio and then took it to the client. They liked the idea, so we all went into production.

IT'S ART : What tools did you use?

The shoes were poly modelled in 3dsmax, and the rest of the job was done in Blender. The modelling work we were fairly used to, but for the fluid work, we needed to plan very carefully since it was always going to be tricky to budget for.

Our experience with Blender and knowing that the fluid engine is just as capable as any other, was the determining factor in using that pipeline. The initial R&D we did prior to winning the job really allowed me to nail down what we needed to do and how much it'd cost us in time and staff resources.


I.A. : What were the major difficulties?

J.N. : The main difficulty was definitely the fluids. They are so tricky to get right. A low resolution test simulation won't behave like a higher res sim of the same scenario so it was a lot of click and wait to see what happens. We had to buy some new 64 bit quad-cores machines with 8 gig ram to do our sims, and we rebuilt Blender to include a multi threaded version of the fluid engine at 64 bits to maximise our ram and CPU usage. This allowed some very high fluid mesh density and made the fluid very realistic in motion when we got it right.

A big concern of the client was that our 3d slime wouldn't look like the slime that Nickelodeon normally uses.

Apparently the Nickelodeon slime has a trademarked consistency and colour so we had to make sure that our sims had the correct motion to match it. This was made tricky by the fact that the film moved along at a fast pace and we needed to make sure various elements had cleared off screen in time for the next shot.

Overall it made for a lot of testing, and to-and-fro between us and the agency.

I.A. : Can you let us know more about the work on shaders and materials?

J.N. : The slime shader ended up being quite simple, since we found a lot of live action video samples in a studio environment. We were lucky that the TVC was set in a infinite-white enviro, since it allowed us to focus only on the diffuse colours, and gaining out highlights from a good monochrome HDRI we've made. It's slightly refractive, and we've glossed that to help the slime feel.

The shoe materials were trickier, since they're made of several different fabrics, each needing subtle flavour to sell it as real. The job required the shoes to look as real and appealing as possible and our prior work on this product range provided us with a good base of materials to use.

I.A. : Have you develop any special scripts? New techniques?

J.N. : Aside from a homebuilt version of Blender to calc our fluid sims, we used the standard Blender 2.46 on everything else. Why? This job didn't need any extra speciality tools. Our techniques in fluids were only really enhanced for the "feel" of the toolset. Our fluid guy Jeremy found a lot of different things to tweak and optimise, and for that, he'll definitely be faster next time. And although it's not really a new thing for us, we shot a lot of live action reference for the shoe's tumbling motion, since we couldn't achieve what we wanted with a hardbody dynamics simulation. The end position of the shoes was important, so we just filmed someone throwing shoe onto the floor until it finally landed in the position we wanted. Much faster than running a dynamics sim to get the same result. The animator then took all the best bounces and takes to make the animation work.