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.
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.
I saw this commercial last year and, with the holidays coming back around, I thought of it again. I did some looking on the Internet and found this blog. I just wanted to say, I love your turducken, it still makes me laugh in all the right ways and thank you for this behind-the-scenes look at making it.
ReplyDeleteJust throwing this comment on all the pages for your mighty turducken ;)