Liquid Simulation Series: Hornitos Tequila part 1

To showcase the purity of Hornitos Tequila, this spot endeavored to set a pure but sultry atmosphere.  In a dark void, the tequila pours slowly from the bottle to cascade across a surface embossed with lettering touting the spirits’ assets.  We follow the liquid as it spills across crackling ice in which more of the tequilas’ qualities are engraved.  The spot ends with the liquid pouring headlong into a pool topped by the Hornitos logo.  The mood needed to be slow, deliberate and provocative.  The final piece remained true to this brief throughout being story boarded, pre-vized, animated, directed, lit and finished all in house at Smoke and Mirrors NY. Every part of this spot is completely CG generated, from metal to ice, bottle to liquid.

Given the voice-over script and a few inspiration images, the SMNY team set to work concepting their ideas for the piece, initially devising each shot using animated sketches.   Having established various shots, the team then combined their sketches of the proposed flow of tequila with grey scale 3D elements to nail down the look and feel of the fluid motions in the spot.

Having solidly pre-vized the spot, the next step was to create the remaining CG elements in the spot as well as perform the liquid simulation as depicted in the boardomatic sketches.  Check back tomorrow for more on that!

Liquid Simulation Series: Mountain Dew part 3

Creating a flow of such magnitude at the scale of a dam was not without it’s trial and error!  Working in RealFlow, the team was faced with reigning in calculations and numerical values of the real physical properties of laminar and turbulent flow.  Setting up scenes to simulate overnight, the team often found that one small error, such as a misplaced decimal or a slightly inflated value produced some disastrous effects!  See below...one decimal out of place caused the simulation to explode water from all sides:

There are no mistakes though; only lessons!  These ‘bloopers’ were just part of the R&D process and ultimately helped the team gain a more in depth knowledge of the software and the best way to control it.

The knowledge the team gained working on this spot came in quite handy as, just as soon as Mountain Dew wrapped, the team set to work on another liquids simulation piece for Hornitos Tequila.  A much smaller scale, this piece had an entirely different look and feel that presented its own unique challenges.  Take a look at the spot below and check this space tomorrow for more on how it was created!

Liquid Simulation Series: Mountain Dew part 2

After mastering the main flow of the dam, the team was ready to attack all of the splashing elements that characterize the turbulent flow of the surging water.  The crux of the simulation, these splash elements were actually comprised of several separate fluid simulations that, when brought together, would create the overall effect of crashing water.

various splash simulations and the script used to strip out excess particle

As was mentioned in the previous post, the final simulations had to run at an extreme resolution in order to ensure that there was enough detail within the splashes to create a realistic look to the flow.  However, it was impossible to work at this level of detail and then actually render within the 3D authoring tool.  To navigate this issue, the team wrote a bespoke script that would strip out the extraneous particles from the simulation while maintaining an aesthetically workable resolution [see image above].  In addition, they did a tremendous amount of R&D work to push the limits of the system to determine how high they could set the particle count and still finish simulating on schedule.   As such, they were able to create a simulation with a fairly high level of detail in the splashes. The three images below illustrate the level of detail visible at increasingly zoomed in distances.  These images were taken of the particle clouds after the script had been run.  Click on the images for a larger view.

zoomed out

zooming in closer

zooming closer still

Looking at the clip above, each colored box represents an independent splash.  These splashes were created by the curvature and density of the primary fluid simulation down the dam. Particles were emitted wherever details in the waviness or density of the main flow met specific criteria. In this case above, when the threshold for the density fell below a certain level, splashes occurred. In other words, the edges of the water happened where it met the geometry of the dam. 

splash simulations looking down the dam:  each colored box represents an independent splash

splash simulations:  alternative view of the various splashes interacting down the dam

Because each splash was composed of several fluid simulations, the next challenge was usurping enough machine power to actually complete each simulation.  Working in Next Limit’s RealFlow, the software’s IDOC (Independent Domain of Computation) system was a incredible help as it allowed the team to complete different elements of each splash simulation across multiple machines, thus allowing the team to have more time to research, develop and perfect the piece and also allowing them to complete the work on schedule.

As mentioned before, it took an incredible amount of R&D to perfect the fluid simulations.  Check back tomorrow to see a few of the ill-fated attempts that eventually led the CG team to their completed work.

Liquid Simulation Series: Mountain Dew part 1

The Smoke & Mirrors CG team has been hard at work honing their fluid simulation skills in the past few weeks, first with a complex spot for Mountain Dew India featuring a gushing dam and then with a beautifully smooth piece for Hornitos Tequila.  Simulating the frenetic surge of a large scale dam in RealFlow for Mountain Dew was a welcome challenge for the CG team, and the research they conducted to complete Mountain Dew helped them to quickly and easily nail the simulations to finish the Hornitos piece.

There were two main challenges to simulating the dam flow:  scale and resolution; Scale was the largest hurdle for the team to overcome. In order for the liquid to feel massive, an accurate scale needed to be established early on for the particle simulations. Had the real-world scale been ignored, the liquid would have felt like it was operating in miniature.  Working at the scale of a dam, however, created other challenges in terms of render time and resolution.

To accomplish realism at such a scale, the fluid simulation actually required a conglomeration of several smaller simulations: one to create the main, massive flow of water down the dam and then several others to simulate the various splashes that occurred in the waters’ journey down the slope.

Ironing out the main flow first, the team simulated this surge without the other splashing elements using a grid domain.  This helped to contain this specific flow and allowed for faster and more predictable simulation. 

­

The next hurdle the team encountered was resolution, aka how dense could they simulate the particles and still finish the job on schedule. Since it was concluded that they would be using mostly particle shading for the foamy whitewater, the particle density needed to be extremely high - much higher than the traditional mesh shading common to smaller liquid jobs. Some of the scenes clocked in at upwards of 25 million particles.  For purposes of testing however, simulations were run at 1/50 of the final resolution that they were to be rendered.   At this scale the team could get a clear idea of the physical properties of the fluid that needed tweaking to perfect the simulation without having to deal with the heavy renders.

Having tackled the main flow of water down the dam, the team then dove into R&D for the various splash simulations.  This was a complex process that required work at a very high resolution....check this space tomorrow to see how the team achieved this!

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!

Toshiba "Ethernet" Deconstructed

In this humorous spot for Toshiba, director Ulf Johansson explores the idea of the butterfly effect as the unplugging of an ethernet connection engenders a chain reaction of events across the universe from the downing of powerlines to the failure of a satellite orbiting the Earth.

Responsible for the satellite scene, the Smoke & Mirrors CG team created all of the elements in the space environment in which the satellite sparks and fails, causing a driver's GPS system to go haywire.   

Full Satellite Model

Satellite Model

 The first order of business for the team was to design and model the satellite. Using multiple references, the team created a satellite to be animated and composited into the space environment overlooking earth.  

With a completed satellite model on hand, the team then generated the Earth background environment. Developing this background image from scratch, the team layered several render passes to compose a believable remote view of the luminous planet.  

Earth Background Render Passes & Final Composite

Utilizing Nuke to composite the entire scene, the team married the Earth background with the several passes used to render the satellite animation to create the short clip of the failing satellite.  

Satellite Render Passes & Final Composite

Nuke Render Tree

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".

CreditReport.com Deconstructed // Part 3 / Animation & Compositing

After nailing down the look, it was time to animate and integrate the CG letters with the cleverly shot live action footage.  Deftly handled by S&M's lead animator, each letter needed to look natural as it peeled of and fell away in the "Unreliable" spot.  To achieve this, each letter was hand animated to maintain the organic look and feel.  Once animated, the S&M Flame team took over to accomplish the final compositing and finishing.  Our lead animator utilized a similar approach for the animation of the more rigid lettering featured in the CreditReport.com "Lazy" spot.  Check out the breakdown below!

CreditReport.com Deconstructed // Part 2 / Design

Having overcome the hurdle of how to shoot the spot, the next question was one of design.  What should the lettering look like?  How should it move? In the 'Unreliable' spot, the agency was searching for a look evocative of childhood so they enlisted the S&M design and animation departments for ideas.  

Kicking off the design process with letters comprised of a complex collage of childhood relics, the look of the text evolved into a simpler hand-drawn aesthetic.  Have a look at the design evolution below:

design evolution of "unreliable"

Finally landing on the scribbled crayon appearance, the team then provided several different options for the look and motion of the scribbling within the letter outlines.  Check out the 'scribble' development options below:

Check back tomorrow for the final entry on the CreditReport.com breakdown to see what look was chosen and how the letters were integrated with the live action footage.

CreditReport.com Deconstructed // Part 1 / Devising the Shoot Method

Finding solutions is what we do.

How to have an actor interact with letters that don't yet exist:  that was the first challenge given to us by the Martin Agency to create these two spots for CreditReport.com.  Our solution was to negatively charge a piece of perspex so large  that you wouldn't be able to see the edges of it in camera and then have a non-charged medium cling to it but be movable.

We started the tests with pieces of paper.  While paper is opaque, it was a medium that we could use to quickly and easily test how easily an actor would be able to interact with the text elements while still looking to camera and also proved that used the statically charged elements would help us achieve our goal of manipulating the letters in camera.  See test below.

The next hurdle was then to find a translucent medium with which to construct the letters as that would help to minimize the clean up work that would need to happen in post. We chose heavy perspex lettering which provided the transparency we needed, but as you can see in the spots above, each commercial required letters with different properties.  "Lazy" required a rigid type of lettering while "Unreliable" needed flexible letters.   Unfortunately, this perspex lettering was a bit heavier than the static could hold.

With that we progressed a bi-pack of perspex, each with different properties. These combined properties gave us exactly what we wanted: either flexible or rigid letters depending on the commercial that would be transparent enough to camera (requiring minimal cleanup in post) but still visible to the actor for easy manipulation. See the test below.

Check back tomorrow for more on how the design process unfolded for the word 'Unreliable' in CreditReport.com's "Unreliable" spot.

Moen Deconstructed / Part 5 // Faucet Models

The final responsibility assigned to the S&M CG team for these spots was to create photo-real versions of the Moen faucets being advertised for use in both the body and end tags.  Having modeled, lit and rendered the faucets, the S&M CG and Flame team combined forces to design the look and animation of the end tags.