The original project had already been completed by the time I got called in; it was for a ‘redux’ version of the ad. In this version, I simmed rocks rolling along the surface of the monoliths (in LW), and helped fix and set up the Maya scenes for render.
The cg aspect to this — falling blueberries on yoghurt in a pot — was another solo job for me. The final comp was a Flame job, though I always try to get 3d renders as close to the actual colours as possible.
There was no pre-production for me as this was just given to me all of a sudden; I would have liked to have gotten lighting information in the set and reference plates. Basically, what we had — not a whole lot — was all that I could work on. Thankfully, there was a close-up shot of the pot as part of the edit, which I used as projected texture back to my cg pot model. This allowed me to get graded colours directly onto the 3d render.
The viscous yoghurt fluid sim was done in Realflow, and rendered in V-Ray because the sub-surface shading there was very easy to get. But the rest of the elements were rendered in LightWave where I could get the most control over how colours were being rendered. This was important because I had also taken a piece of reference footage which showed how the pot looked like under a lighting condition similar to that of the cut. LightWave’s nodal shading system made it easier for me to control the shading of local areas.