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↑ Grab this Headline Animator

I.A. : Can you explain us your pipeline for such a project?

J.N. : Actually the pipeline on this job was pretty basic. We modelled the shoes as low res polys ready to smooth up, brought them into Blender to map and shade and had them approved. After each shot's end position was determined, we ran the fluid sim in conjuction with our work in animation, to get a nice splash. While the shading and lighting was being done, we also populated the spot with various transition effects, and of course the slime logo at the end.

One rather large hiccup was that a week before the deadline, the client decided to change the shoes that were being used in the spot. First they changed the girls shoe, which wasn't too bad considering no fluids or other interaction was required, but then they changed the boys shoe as well, which meant we had 1 week to model,map and shade 2 new shoes to realism level, AND re run the appropriate fluid sims to suit. Luckily we had the spare capacity in modeling to do it and the fluid guy had polished his other scenes early, but nonetheless it was a very rushed and busy week for all.

I.A. : Can you give us any idea of some of the tricks you've used in this spot?

J.N. : Not so much as in the way of tricks, just lots of testing. The fluid engine is so strong that there isn't really much you can't achieve but you just have to persevere in testing over and over again. We tried many many different permutations of settings, and then made OpenGL test renders of each one. We then sat down and viewed them all to pick apart each one to see why one worked and one didn't. Each of these tests' blenderfile had been saved so we could pull settings from one and put them into another. I call it the "shotgun effect", make lots of permuations and you're bound to get one thats closer and closer to what's corrrect.

I.A. : How long did you work on it?

J.N. : Start to finish, production took a bit over a month. We were given a good storyboard and animatic to work from so all we did was populate it up with 3d. We had a total of 6 people on it, each required at different levels at different stages. The fulltime work was fluids and shading, and otherwise the rest of it was in and around our other studio production.

I.A. : What was the rendering time?

J.N. : Rendering was made very simple by the compositor and editor inside Blender. We set up the look and feel, giving the client plenty of still frames and OpenGL movies to lock off. Once we had a scene ready, we just put to the render queue it, which fed straight into the edit. Single frame times varied between 1-4 minutes at NTSC res so it wasn't an expensive computation at all.

I.A. : Anything else

J.N : The job was straight forward in terms of client expectation. We knew what they wanted because got a very clear animatic and we had the physical shoes here to work from. We found plenty of reference footage of the slime (which is already well known ) and that helped tremendously. Aside from the last minute rush to change the shoes into new models and the general fiddle gettng the fluid sim right, the project was great.

Both the agency and the client said they were happy with it and it went to air nationally around the US on 4th of August with a lot of spots booked which is always a good sign.
Personally I think it looked good and so far we've had a lot of positive feedback from our client base in Australia so hopefully we'll get some more of that work out here too. The tools didn't trip us so technically it was a tremendously smooth project, and I can say that the guys enjoyed working on it as well. I just hope more clients read this and see what they need to do to help make a smoother 3d production!!

Links

ProMotion Studios : www.promotionstudios.com

Short movie : The making of lighthouse by ProMotion studios