Category: Work

Commercial: Spark Light Box

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This was a joint effort by Dan McKay and I, with him driving the project from After Effects. My part lay mostly on populating the screens with footage. But there was a particular problem; the clients did not/could not sign off on all the footage, and knowing that in advance, I thought of making the footage generation procedural, so that Dan could render his bits and I could create the screen footage separately, thus working in parallel.

The main technique was UV mapping (STMapping in Nuke) plus floating-point ID mattes. It wasn’t enough to use UV mapping because even though I could easily map a footage on a screen, there were hundreds of screens that needed semi-random footage running on them. Using RGB mattes were out of the question since I would end up, still, with too many mattes to manage. I decided that I needed to mark these screens by ID, and so approached it a numbers-based AOV render.

This was done by first UV mapping all the screens into one UV map, then create two ramps (one U and the other V) with  gradients and a precise multiply calculations which enabled colour ranges way past 1.0. The idea is that the first screen would have the surface value of 0, and another will be 1.0, and the next 2.0, and so on. When rendered from Maya as an .exr, every screen looks white, but when colour-picked in Nuke, floating-point values are recognised.

In Nuke, I created an setup which took any number of footage variations, and randomly assigned them to ID mattes, which were subsequently piped into STMaps. The result is that I had a ‘rig’ which I could switch any footage for another, replace any one screen with a particular footage if I wanted to, and/or change the randomisation of generic screens at any time.

It was a technical challenge that I found satisfying, and all the more so because the client did the predictable thing and started change stuff around. But we were ready.

Watching the video, one would never think the lengths of which artists go through to account for things that seems out of scope of a commercial. Most people just think about colours, sound, motion, effects, and all the stuff that’s in front of them; but as cg artists, we have to think about the framework behind all that in order to accommodate eventualities known client feedback.

Commercial: Mother Earth “Snacks”

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I rarely get solo projects, and when I do, it’s often some retail job that either involve the simplest form of motion graphics that a 10-year old could do, or some CG-ish product shot that covers the same old ground that I’ve been treading on for 13 years now.

Well, although, this ad is of the second form (CG-ish product), the fact that it is a solo project is something that always fills me with delight, as I feel freest when I work alone as I move into the pace that suits me best.

For a product ad, for what it is, I think the ad is visually ok. Obviously, it breaks no barriers, but I had fun doing it. I learned a bit more about LightWave’s instancing, added some features and fixed bugs in Janus; it was relaxing to do something on my own, based on my own tastes.

Commercial: Vector Solar Green House

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Remember that this work thread is about the fact that cg projects are rarely straightforward; one artist might look he’s not doing anything, when, in fact, he’s doing everything, and vice-versa.

My contribution to this commercial is intermingled with the fact that it had been animated, and its look set up by someone else to be rendered in Octane, a GPU-based, unbiased renderer, presumably to make rendering faster and more beautiful. However, it wasn’t faster, and it wasn’t that much more beautiful, as the look was mainly AO-like. Time was running out. We have a renderfarm that can render mental ray, V-Ray, LightWave, and After Effects; but not Octane. So, it was passed on to me so I can render and comp it in time. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t just about hitting the render button in LightWave.

I took the original assets, replaced everything with LightWave shaders, tweaked the shadows and diffuse shading so that they matched, as close as possible, to the original test Octane renders, and had to fix many of the errors present in the scene, as well a number of broken models. I strategised on how much needs rendering based on the animatics; I used Janus, the ultimate LW ass-saver, to breakout lots of the necessary animated elements and mattes, and rendered them; Richard and I did the motion graphics, and I comped everything for the final product in After Effects.

This hot-potato workflow, in which a project is tossed completely to another person to be rescued, is out of my control; I simply have to do it. The main problem I have with it is that few recognises it as that: a pawning-off of accountability and yet accepting the full credit for it (as such, I’m not credited). And, again, this is why this work thread is being written: a project like this would not have seen the light of day if someone hadn’t objectively dealt with the details that were required to actually finish the job to the client’s standards. What you see isn’t what went on.

There are hard facts in professional workflows, which some are in denial of. Workflows that fly against simple reason will not get them where they want, no matter how much they cuss or growl at the monitor. There is a lesson to be learnt here, but are those who need to learn it actually get it?

Commercial: Mother Earth Pingos

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(Click to watch video)

This is one of those many commercials that I do that best serve as an example of why I started to post these works up. I’ll explain. This commercial is Mother Earth – Pingos, and if we go by the usual way we credit these sorts of works in the commercials industry, I would be considered as having nothing to do with the project whatsoever. The animatic was done by the animation director, and from there everything else was was done by Terry. The main character was primarily animated by Paul working as a contractor. Terry set up, lit, shaded, and rendered all this in V-Ray, and then comped it up as well.

My part was a thing called Sandline, our budding shot/cache automation system, which has grown much since then. It wasn’t me who operated it, however; it was just me who’s developing it. Sandline is one of those things that helped Terry along the way; conversely, Terry helped refine Sandline as well by spotting workflow issues as it related to this job.

Oh, I lied; I just remembered I did actually do something in the ad: I did the cool looking ribbon logo animation at the end. There! Can I have my award now?

Commercial: AUT Discover Possible

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There are some jobs that I have contributed a very minor part. And sometimes even those minor parts were eventually culled from the final work, as was the case with this job. One invisible contribution I had was the procedural light bulb animation at the beginning, and the rigging of the multi-legged robot.

Again, jobs like these are exactly the reason why I’m putting them up. Sometimes, you need to say you were there, you worked, and you participated.

 

Commercial: Macquarie’s Bank (Tools/Otter)

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(Click to watch video)

In most jobs, I’m glad to be working in the shadows. There are some jobs that I’m really glad to be in the shadows. This is one of them.

Let me be clear: when I say I’m glad to be in the shadows, I don’t mean not being associated with the ad; I’m perfectly fine with the final product (not to say I particularly like it — I’m just fine with it). What I mean about shadows is this: it’s like being inside a tank while looking at a huge industrial fan and above it, tonnes of horse shit ready to drop onto it. When I see trouble, I try to warn off the people. If people don’t listen, I take cover myself.

And remember that this work thread is not just about what you see, but about invisible things behind the work you see. And in this case, what was behind was quite incredible from a production point of view. And I don’t mean incredible in a good way. But let me only say one thing among many things:

We didn’t have the render hardware and software to render Yeti fur, and that we had to sink lots of money to subcontract our rendering; first in the messianic illusion that is cloud-rendering, and second, when that failed to save, in an old-school outsourcing rendering service. The good news is that after two years of waiting (the job was 2 years ago) we have finally incrementally upgraded our software and hardware. There, I wasn’t being that negative was I? Less is definitely more: when you have shit hardware you have to rely on your smarts to get things done. So I’m not choked up about hardware because it helps me shine!

Speaking of shine, there are those that brought the goods on this project. Louis Desrochers groomed the Yeti fur look, and we devised a way to generate wet maps from Maya, since the our Realflow op couldn’t get wet maps from Hybrido sims at the time. We used a combination of ambient occlusion maps that have an Time Echo effect applied in After Affects; that image sequence drove the Yeti maps; I was the one that wrote the script to bake animated ambient occlusion maps to be plugged into AE.

There were so many other people involved in this project, and contributed their part in it: I didn’t even get to rig the otter! That’s a first! Of course, as usual, I was there to clean up the scenes and troubleshooting the most stubborn of the lot. But when the dust finally settled all I wanted to do is forget about it.

 

 

Commercial: Macquarie’s Bank (Hermit Crab)

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My contribution to this ad is typical of my usual: bits and pieces everywhere, not claiming to a whole lot, and yet stuck on to it like bees in a hive (funny metaphor methinks).

I took HDRs during the shoot and assisted in the vfx supervision. Meanwhile, back in the studio, to the advice of Will Brand, we had laser-scanned reference shells and Terry was busy cleaning them up. Afterwards, I rigged the crab as other work continued on it.

I tracked and set-up most (if not all — can’t really remember) the shots, including the base lighting found in the HDRs. I had only one scene on my name, but, inevitably, at the tail-end of the commercial, when the producer started ending the contractors’ terms, Terry and I were left to fix up the needed bits for the Flame op.

That sort of arrangement is often the case with jobs that require a number of people; as the quasi-core group, a lot of the heavy lifting goes to the contractors who are hired especially for that; when the bulk of the work is done, whatever other technical issues that require sorting often comes down to us, because by that time, the producer has decided it’s costing too much to have contractors hang on (oftentimes I think the reason is that the producer has hired too many guns to begin with). And that’s why it sometimes feels like we’re clean-up men.

 

Vignette: Forest Road

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About a year ago, a client connected with Toyota requested a bid from the company. Part of that request was a edited compilation of the commercial style they were looking for. It was slick; fast-moving, lots of stylised cinematography. We didn’t get it, and for reasons I never usually know. Yet, it was no surprise; nothing in our company reel resembled anything like it.

I thought — it was not a new idea for me — why not take some cuts from the compilation, and recreate it in 3d or something? The simple thought was that at the end of it, new slick material can be put on the reel. I attempted to do this by creating the road forest scene you see above; this was based on one of the scenes in the compilation, though I had put in more detail and brightened things up a bit.

To be honest, this piece is half-baked, as I was soon overrun with other work and didn’t bother to revisit it, mainly because no one else in the company was interested in making new in-house material.

The song is by Graham Hadfield, whose Carbon album I first heard in a Guardian online article on Arctic drilling. Pretty interesting stuff.