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!

Delta Deconstructed Part 2 // "Action/Reaction"

This second spot that we completed for Delta, “Action/Reaction”, directed by Lance Accord of Park Pictures, is a black and white split screen piece that mirrors the actions of Delta customers against the actions of the Delta Airlines service. With the screen divided either vertically or horizontally, the spot elegantly illustrates how a customer’s action engenders a reaction in kind from Delta and vice versa, highlighting everything from Delta mobile apps to in-flight service.    

As with “Reach”, the use of CG in this spot was subtle but necessary to enhance the spot.  Referring specifically to the shot in the piece that reflects the shadow of a plane on the ground with the reflection of the pilots walking toward their aircraft, the CG team was able to use an aircraft model that the created (see image in previous post) to animate the plane’s shadow against the timing of the pilots’ walking movement.

Delta Deconstructed Part 1 // "Reach"

In this elegant black and white spot for Delta, the use of 3D was subtle but essential.  Directed by Ellen Kuras of Park Pictures, the first spot, “Reach”, features iconic shots of various locations around the globe: the London Eye in London, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Brooklyn Bridge in New York to name a few.  Each shot in the spot focuses skyward highlighting both the recognizable features of the locale as well as the Delta plane flying overhead to emphasize the varied locations that Delta services.  It is in these skyward shots where the Smoke & Mirrors CG team came into play.  

various Delta planes, modeled and textured

Charged with integrating the Delta aircrafts into each scene, the team first created the airplane based on references provided by the agency, Weiden + Kennedy.  

Then, the team expertly tracked the plane into each scene, adjusting the lighting for realistic and seamless incorporation into the spot.

Check back tomorrow for more on the other Delta spot we worked on "Action/Reaction".

Moen Deconstructed / Part 1 // Testing the Concept

Emphasizing the passage of time and the product's longevity, we see life lived through the reflections in the shiny chrome of sink faucets in these two spots devised for Moen by the Martin Agency. Completing this work presented the S&M CG team with several exciting challenges.

The crux of the concept for these ads was, of course, to see activity reflected on the surface of the shiny faucets.  Knowing that shooting reflections in camera could produce unpredictable and uncontrollable results, the S&M team experimented with creating and manipulating these reflections in CG.

Mocking up a test faucet model, the test scene was textured and lit to give it the shiny chrome aesthetic.  Then, the team mapped an existing piece of footage onto a plane in XSI and experimented with the placement of the plane in the scene to change the size, shape and placement of the reflections in the faucet, giving them a better idea of how to control the reflections. 

Having devised a method for working with the reflections, the next step in the process was to actually shoot the spots.  Check back tomorrow for a breakdown of how these spots came together on set.

Maryland Lottery Deconstructed :: Part 3 :: Populating the Stadium

ICE tree for bespoke crowd duplication program

To populate the stadium with 80,000 screaming fans, SMNY's R&D team wrote a bespoke program in XSI based on particle systems.  Replacing the particles with the pre-shot green screen footage, the team's program provided for randomized placement of the various fans as well as  for randomized playback of the clips to allow for variation in the stands (see image right).

50 particles in <1 second / 500 particles in approx 1 second / 40,000 particles in approx 4 seconds

This flexible system allows for crowd duplication across any piece of geometry.  Fast as well as flexible, the particle-based system program generates 40,000 "fans" in less than 84seconds.

the turquoise patches tell the program where to fill the geometry with particles

To control the placement and concentration of the fans, the team incorporated into the program the ability to paint on the geometry to direct the particles on where to populate.  Rendering the entire scene to portray a realistic but stylized look that heavily incorporated the Baltimore Ravens colors (purple & gold) yielded the final result:

Maryland Lottery Deconstructed :: Part 2 :: Creating the Fans

The next step for the S&M CG team was to create the fans with which to fill newly modeled and textured stadium. To do this, S&M's TD directed a green screen shoot at Smoke & Mirrors where he captured several S&M employees acting as crazed fans.  

green screen shoot

With several clips of cheering fans, the footage was brought into Flame to key out the green screen.  

keying out the green

With several clips of crazy fans, the R&D team's next challenge was to develop a method of populating the stadium model with them.  To find out how the CG team progressed from green screen to packed stadium, check back on Wednesday September 8.

Maryland Lottery Deconstructed :: Part 1 :: Model & Texture

This most recent spot for the Maryland lottery was a unique challenge for the Smoke & Mirrors CG team.  A 5-commercial campaign, each spot features an exuberant fan singing Broadway-style about a prize he or she won and finishes with an animated end shot of M&T bank stadium filled with cheering fans.  Tasked with creating this end shot under a very tight deadline, there was not time to fully model, texture, light and render the stadium and then fill it with cheering fans, so the team devised a clever work-around.

wireframe model of stadium

model textured with photographs of actual stadium

One member of the S&M CG team traveled to Baltimore to photograph the M&T  Bank Stadium.  Using the exact perspective and focal length from those images, the team created a low-res model of the stadium (see image to the left) that was then textured using those images (see image below).

With a textured model of M&T Bank Stadium in place, the next hurdle for the S&M CG team was to fill the stadium with thousands of cheering fans.  Check back on Tuesday September 7, 2010 to find out more about how they populated the stadium with 80,000 cheering fans in under 4 seconds.