This was done a relative quick job for the New South Wales government. They had, in fact, recently come back to us for a ‘phase 2’ ad along the same lines, only the deadline was a bit shorter.

The ad was in two parts: the cogs and the town hall scene. I’ll just talk about the cogs scene because that was the only part I was involved in.

I was asked to create the cogs that formed the NSW state lines. We bought a few gears off Turbosquid to get started, but other bits and pieces had to be modelled along the way. I had first set up the layout of the gears, and rigged sections of them to follow different controllers. Then individual gear component combinations were rigged, and then placed into the main scene.

The rendering was also done in LightWave, but the final look was supposed to be hand-drawn. This process was in 3 parts.

The base render was from LW, which was a clean, multi-toned render. LW enables me to colour individual gears/items based on the fact that they are instanced or separated, and I used this to quickly shade variations of the colour theme. I like the fact that I can get lots of shading control across whatever shader channel (eg diffuse, specularity) that I’m using.

After the base render, Richard post-processed that in AE using his own concoction of adjustment layers and textures.

And for the third step, Richard‘s AE renders were passed on to Alexandre Belbari and Thomas Buiron, who gave it the more sketchy, organic look.

When it came back to us, Richard add further effects such as the smoke and particles.