Pepto Bismol "Turducken" || Deconstruct || Flocking and Dust

This shot of the herd of turduckens flocking across the terrain presented several challenges to the CG team.  The back plate footage of the dusty plain was sourced from stock footage.  Unfortunately, the footage chosen was a bit tricky as it featured wildabeasts herding across a tree filled landscape.  The S&M flame department painted the wildabeasts out of the plate, but, because of the complexity of the geometry and coloring of the trees in the back plate, they were unable to be rotoscoped out in the same way.  To deal with this, the team recreated the trees in CG and tracked them into the footage.  The whole scene was tracked using PFTrack in order to integrate the herd of turduckens.

The team created the flocking turduckens using ICE in Autodesk Softimage.  The team wrote a bit of bespoke programming within ICE to speed and run cycle differentials within the flock and also to ensure that the turduckens managed to avoid the trees in the scene and also to avoid intersecting and colliding with each other.

One last element that the team devised to help add to the believability of the scene was the incorporation of the dust kicked up on the plain by the running turduckens.  Programming within ICE again, the team wrote a bit of code that calculated the proximity of each turducken to the ground plain.  From that, as soon as a turducken made contact with the ground, particles of dust emitted from the creatures' feet.  While the inclusion of the dust wasn't a specific request of either the director or the agency, the team felt that it was a detail that helped settle the creatures more realistically into the plate and it ultimately added a bit more drama to the scene. 

Pepto Bismol "Turducken" || Deconstruct || Lighting & Compositing

With a completed Turducken in place, our beast needed to be nestled into his environment - a wide open dusty plain where he could run frantically with the rest of the herd.  The CG Team sourced the back plate from stock footage and made a few slight tweaks to achieve the desired look.  The back plate was first re-racked to create a shallow depth of field and sharpen the focus of the shot on the Turducken itself.  The team then set to work on the smaller details that would help to seamlessly integrate the Turducken into the rest of the scene:  the addition of extra turduckens faded into the background for continuity between the close-up animal shot and the wide herding shot, the integration of foreground grass elements and a heat haze and also the addition of the log over which the Turducken jumps in his manic chase.  Created in CG, the team modeled this log, projected an image of a log onto the model for texture and then animated its rocking motion to help assimilate it into the action of the scene.

In integrating the Turducken into the environment, the CG team focused on the subtle details that would add to its realism.  Using the ICE particle system in Autodesk Softimage, the team programmed some of the Turducken's feathers to shake loose and fall to the ground as the animal hurdled the log.  The beak, wattle, comb, eyes and feet were lit using subsurface scattering allowing the light to come from behind these appendages.

Creating the final look of the Turducken's feathers required several passes.  First was a basic color pass and then the team created an 'oily' pass mean to give the feathers a realistic sheen and iridescence. Then there was a reflection pass as well as a subsurface scattering pass to allow for more light to penetrate the areas with fewer feathers. To save on render times, the feathers were completed using a sprite shader rather than raytracing which yielded a physically accurate but much faster result.

The entire shot required 15 render passes in all (including mattes for each individual part).  Rendering at 20 minutes per frame, this was a triumph for the CG team given the complexities presented by the amount of feathers in the scene. 

Be sure to check back on Friday 23rd December for the last of the Pepto Bismol "Turducken" breakdown;  We'll be going behind the scenes of the shot of the mass of flocking turduckens.

Pepto Bismol "Turducken" || Deconstruct || Feathers

One element that greatly added to the realism and believability of the Turducken was the placement and subsequent movement of the beast's feathers.  To seamlessly integrate the creature into the background, it was important that the Turducken's feathers be able to flutter and react with the wind as it raced across the landscape.  To ensure proper feather behavior, the team enlisted a plugin for Autodesk Softimage called mbFeathers and did a bit of R&D to test their control over the distribution and movement of the turducken's feathers.

The CG Team used this test as a diagnostic to ensure that the feathers would sway properly in any wind without intersecting with each other.  

Once satisfied that the feathers would perform as desired, the team distributed the feathers onto the turducken model.  Because the beast was a mixture of three different animals, it needed three types of feathers strategically placed throughout the body.  Using the turducken's texture map as a weight map for the placement, disbursement of feathers along the turducken's body, there were areas on the animal that required solely turkey, duck or chicken feathers and other areas that required a combination of 2 or 3 of these to create a smooth transition from one type of feather to another.  

Once fully cloaked, the Turducken boasted approximately 30,000 feathers of 8 different types (including turkey, duck, chicken and combinations thereof to account for the feathers in the 'transition' spots on the body).  As the beast runs frantically across the landscape, the feathers flutter responding to both momentum and gravity.  A time-intensive process, the simulation of the feather motion was tweaked, perfected and then baked for rendering efficiency.

The feathers on the Turducken's bum were treated differently than the body feathers because they didn't require the same type of simulation as the body feathers.  These feathers were their own separate geometry and their movement was achieved through dynamic strand simulation using ICE.  

To realistically recreate the movement of the Turducken's backside, the team first researched turkey locomotion to determine the kinetics of the feathers' response to the body's action.  Then, in ICE, each strand (feather) was given a high stiffness and the feathers were subjected to a series of physics calculations to precisely simulate the rocking, swaying and fluttering of the bum feathers in response to the Turducken flailing wildly across the plain.

 Putting all of the feather motion together yielded the following result:

Check back on Wednesday for more on the lighting and compositing of the mighty Turducken!

Pepto Bismol "Turducken" || Deconstruct || Rigging + Animation

Having imagined, created and textured the 'mighty turducken', the next challenge facing the S&M CG team was to determine how such a beast might move.  The turducken's motion required a seamless and somewhat humorous combination of the waddle of a duck, the jerky gait of a chicken and the slow lumbering of a turkey.  Settling on these movement decisions affected the rigging of the creature.

With duck's feet, head and neck, a chicken's body and wings, a turkey's bum, and a chicken's facial and head accoutrements, each body part required it's own animal's style of movement.  The feet were rigged to allow for the flapping/clawing movement of a duck's webbed feet whilst the wing and bum feathers had to react and respond to the main body movement.  The chicken's comb and wattle required a hanging limp quality that would allow them to flail in accordance with the creature's head motion.  

We get a good taste of the Turducken's movement in this shot.  Meant to be dramatic in slow-motion, the Turducken has a frenetic but clumsy gait with wings flailing and flapping, webbed feet clawing through the air imitating a swimming motion and head jerking about causing the the flaccid comb and wattle to hang and sway heavily in it's face.  

The next shot in the spot shows a whole herd of turduckens flocking across the land.  The CG team created this herding motion by implementing five different walk cycles on five of the turduckens to provide sufficient variation in the movement of the group.  

Using XSI's ICE, the team then assigned one of the five walk cycles to each of the turduckens in the herd and then randomized the speed and placement of each of the beasts in the crowd as is moved across the landscape.  The end result is a gaggle of seemingly unique turduckens manically racing through uninhabited desert territory with their turkey feathers thrashing, their chicken heads jerking and their duck feet flapping in a frenzied pursuit.

Pepto Bismol "Turducken" || Deconstruct || Design + Modeling

turducken  (ˈtɜːdʌkən)

— n
	a boned turkey stuffed with a boned duck that is stuffed with a small boned chicken, sometimes also containing a breadcrumb or sausagemeat stuffing

Traditionally served as part of a Christmas or Thanksgiving holiday feast, the challenge facing S&M in completing this humorous spot for Pepto Bismol was to imagine what this tasty treat might look like as an actual beast and how it would behave in the wild.  A fun and exciting assignment, the Smoke & Mirrors Design team set to work visualizing this bizarre animal and its various attributes. Would it have a turkey's head or a duck's head?  Would it walk like a turkey or waddle like a duck?  Would the feather configuration more closely follow the lighter hues of a chicken, the earth tones of a turkey, or the more vibrant colors of a duck?

The Smoke & Mirrors Design team addressed these questions and many more while conceptualizing their version of the mighty turducken.  Creating several combinations of turkey/duck/chicken, they presented the agency, Publicis Worldwide, with several options from which to choose:

Turducken Design || Iteration

This first version boasted a duck's face, neck and feet,  a turkey's bum and a chicken's body, wings and facial embelishments.

Turducken Design || Iteration 2

This second iteration pushed that idea a bit further playing with different ideas for the head wings and tail and explored the possibility of a more chicken-like face and the incorporation of duck wings and a hybrid duck/turkey leg.

Turducken Design || Iteration 3

Yet another iteration experimented with the chicken's and turkey's bum feathers and face, the duck's body and beak and the chicken's and turkey's feet and facial features.

Final Turducken Design

After several design iterations, the team landed on the final design:  The green-hued head, beak and webbed feet of a mallard duck, the facial embellishments (comb and wattle) of a chicken, a body incorporating a gradation of the feathering of all three animals, turkey wings and the voluminous fanned feather configuration of a turkey's bum.

Having settled on the look of the beast, the step for the S&M CG was to create the 3D version of the creature.  Modeled using Mudbox, attention to creating the small details of the animal were extremely important in lending a sense of realism to the character.  Mudbox allowed the team to intricately sculpt the animal to make it into a believable integration of turkey, duck and chicken attributes.

Detailed model shot of the duck beak and head, turkey's wattle and chicken's comb

Texturing the model came next.  A bit of an unusual challenge, the team had to seamlessly blend the coloring of a turkey, duck and chicken.  This texture would later help determine what type of feathers would be placed where on the animal's body.  Using a program called Mari by The Foundry, the S&M CG team textured the turducken by painting directly onto the body of the model.  

Turducken texture map

With a fully modeled and textured turducken in place, the team set to work rigging and animating the creature.  Check back on Friday 16 December for more on this and stay tuned to this space the rest of this week to learn more about the rest of the work that went into achieving this spot!