The making of Nike MercurialX / Simon Fiedler

thanks guys thanks for coming out to the Maximus also thank you to Maxim for inviting me again and hello Internet actually my mom is watching so hi mom yeah today I want to talk about the making off of the Nike Mercurial export that we did I'm a freelancer and I work in minds which is close to Frankfurt and we have a small office with some other freelancers and yeah we produce this spot and a super small team of only three people and before I explain you how we did it let's take a look at the actual spot you thanks guys all right so that's the Nike Mercurial axe end of last year I got an email from an advertiser advertising agency from London which is called village green very nice guys and they asked me to do a style frame for a print campaign and was just a tire and some smoke around it like it or not and I did that it was a lot of fun and shortly after that they wrote me another email okay now nike wants to have a commercial like a one minute piece featuring this shoe and a car I was like okay car I did a lot of car job car jobs in the past and I kind of tried to get rid of cars but then they came up with the initial brief so they told me a lot of stuff about the whole campaign and how everything should work but there were a few keywords that triggered in my mind one was it should be a fast and dangerous street race I thought okay cars are actually not too bad if you can make something like that the second thing was it should have neon and lasers I was like okay I like laser so that sounds pretty good and the last thing which actually made me jump onto the job was they wanted burnouts so who doesn't like burnouts with those Street race things the whole campaign is about taking the shoe and pair it somehow with the aggression and the speed and the danger of an illegal street race at night so kind of this fast and furious stuff so the shoe is so fast and so impossible dangerous you should buy it it's super cool and the problem was that there was only one guy so I knew that creating a one minute peace and that time alone is maybe a little bit too much for me and for such a big client so I asked two friends one is past Jennifer who is hopefully also watching he's one guy who sits right next to me in my office also freelancer and I also told them a we have to do some burnouts and lasers and he was like cool yeah for sure perfect and the third guy was Matty PI akka also know him from from studies years back and we worked on some projects in the past and it always went perfectly fine so we teamed up and had some nice conversations with village green so the first thing they sent us was actually some mood board so this is only a small part of what they send us actually just to give us an idea what they have in mind style-wise how it should look and we try to find the visual language of the stuff that they send us so what we saw is okay it should definitely be super dark they wanted to have a lot of glowing stuff here and there like those cars that you know from The Fast and Furious movies with lights underneath the cars and yeah actually a car where you would usually be embarrassed to drive around with that but for that kind of purpose it was perfectly fine then we have a modern and urban environment but it was not really an environment that is visible most of it just works through reflection in the car that we don't see too much they want to have some nice little details so for example on the car itself we have the hello we have the material X logo somewhere on the car so on the on the brakes or on the back of the car we always have the material X logo somewhere hidden and of course they wanted to have a lot of reflections in there so everything is super dark and the whole shape of the car is basically defined through its reflections in this neon laser environment so after we talked about about about this and the guys from village green recognized okay we know what they mean we understood what kind of language they want to speak in this film they produced a nice storyboard for us and they basically just use some 3d models that they found or produced staged them in a 3d scene and made some stills and just try to figure out a nice storyline for the whole film what they have in mind and gave that to us and asked us for our opinions does that work as a film so we took a look at this and we had to feel okay this could work as a film we had some ideas what we could change how we could make some of those scenes they had a picture in mind for some scenes but maybe not how old the transition from one show to the others so this is what we then came in and what we then did first is a 2d animator so this had several reasons so the most important this you get a feeling for lengths and timing of the film so we knew that the spot itself should be around one minute I think in the end it's one minute sharp and while you're doing storyboards it's pretty hard to tell if this is one minute of it's two minutes or thirty seconds it says you don't understand how long each image is in the film and this is pretty good if you then make it to the animatic and just cut one picture after the other and try to estimate the length of each shot you also can break down the film in two shots afterwards so because in the in the animatic not every picture has to be a several separate shot sometimes three images actually have one shot so it was just good for us to break it down into shots number the shots so that we just that all of us note know what we talked about if I say for example here Bastion let's talk about shot fifty and then he knows exactly what it is instead that I say do you know this one shot where there's the car in the camera from front and there's some light going on do you know what I mean and this is always a little bit hard so it's good to bring some structure in there even if the shot list changes over time over and over again so we made a spreadsheet basically and produce some shots in there and one thing I learned over the time is it's always a good idea to number your shots in 10 steps so don't name your first shot 1 2 3 4 5 but after a while you decide ok we need another shot in between and then you have shot to be or to point something and so it's much better if you name the first shot 10 20 30 40 and then if you have a shot in between you can slide it in as 15 or 25 and so you have like eight slots between two shots where you can put in extra shots and that's usually more than enough so that's actually the 2d animatic we also passed you and also put together a layout sound this is just sound we found everywhere from movies whatever just to get a feeling for the whole rhythm and the speed and they the kind of music that we see in this film so this is the images from the storyboard which are just animated after five to 2d so that was the very first version as you can see here looks like this so you can see Jamie yeah so you can see this was as I said the first version of the of the whole film but you see that there's a lot of similarities to the final product there were shots in there that didn't make it to the final piece but that was a it's a good base to have something to talk about with the clients also and with the agency let me just see okay look at this it doesn't work that well we have some shots in there which didn't make it into the final movie like the wind tunnel effect which isn't there which was kind of sad but it got kicked out but that was what we did next so the next task was to prepare our assets that we need for the for the film of course the hero asset of the whole film is issue itself and we had some some points to keep in mind so it should be highly detailed because we have to go very very close with the camera to the shoe it has a pretty heavy subsurface scattering material on the sole so it was this silicone kind of sole and the shoe itself actually the color on the sole is not on the silicon it's underneath a sheet of plastic which is colored in those neon colors it's a gradient from orange to pink and the soul itself is transparent so we had to figure out how to do that the shoe itself is partially covered with a rubber surface so we can see here this edge so the side or here this is covered with the rubber edge which is reflective and make sure makes it water repellent I think and the upper part of the shoe so this area is not reflective at all it's totally diffused fabric fabric material since we knew how much time we have and that we need this level of detail and all the textures have to be perfect like they like the actual shoe we knew okay we have to use a 3d scan because there's no 3d model available for this shoe we only had like CAD data for the for the sole but for the shoe itself there was nothing available unfortunately no one of us had big experience with 3d scanning we we knew how photogrammetry works but I would excuse me we were all pretty sure that it's a bad idea to learn 3d scanning on an actual project so luckily I know a guy his name is hala cabeza some of you might know his his tools he's producing scripts and all the stuff for cinema 4d and during the last month he developed a pretty amazing pipeline for 3d scanning by himself he's doing it at home and he also scans some shoes before so we knew maybe he's the right guy so we brought him into the team and then they set the prototype they send it over the prototype of the shoe to Hogan and he builds a foot out of styrofoam to put it into the shoe put it in his in his rig and did the 3d scan for us and he was kind enough to record a little screen capture so for those of you who don't know who photogrammetry works I'm not an expert but I can explain it basically you take a ton of photos of your object from different angles try to light it as diffuse as possible so don't that you don't get highlights that that's always totally flat and then you bring those pictures into some software for example this is agata photoscan and it analyzes the pictures and then it can recalculate the object that you photographed and all those blue planes that you see over here are actually the calculated camera angles so the computer found out that one picture was taken from here one from here one from here so all in all Hogan made 188 angles of the shoe he added on a tripod and turn it around slowly but the thing is we knew we had to go super close on the shoe and what those for the grêmio tree programs don't like is depth of field you need a sharp image so you have the choice that you go further away with it with a with another lens but then you lose detail if everything is sharp so he came up with the idea to actually don't know if it's his idea but I heard it first from him and this is pretty amazing so he used the macro lens on his camera where you can go super super super close on the object the problem with the macro lens is that you have a very shallow area of focus so only a small part of the health the image is actually the rest is out of focus so he actually took took 12 pictures per angle with 12 different focal lengths so he pushed the sharp area through the image and took 12 pictures of every angle and then he used another software which is used by macro photographers which is a focus teacher so this software basically isolates the shop area from every image and stitches them together I have no idea that works but it works and in the end you get a perfectly 100% sharp image of this of this angle and he did that for every angle so in the end we ended up with 2256 photos of the shoe I don't know if he still likes Nike shoes but you've seen a lot the next problem was the rubber material here on the side what I talked about for 3d scanning you use as many flashes as you can and distribute them and make them super soft that the light is very very diffused on the shoe because you don't want in the the texture which is also captured by the scanning software you don't want to have highlights in there it should be totally flat so the problem was even if you use giant soft boxes you get some highlights in the indus river surface because it's so reflective so what Holger did is a technique that is used by people who take pictures of famous oil paintings because that all color is also reflecting light and you don't want to have that if you have an art catalog or something so you basically take take a polarization filter and put that on your flashes so the light which comes through your flashes is linear polarized and then you take a second polarization filter and put it on your camera and set it to 45 degree angle and with that technique you get rid of every reflection in the image it's totally crazy you take a look at the photos afterwards and it looks like a pure diffused channel from a 3d render so you can get rid of all those reflections and the good thing is if you do both so one with reflection and one without and then you subtract both images from each other you get a specular map so this is totally crazy and yeah so we ended up with a pretty detailed scan which was amazing and a very nice data set of textures which was I think in the beginning it was 16k in the final production we used I think only 4k but it was good to have that amount of detail and this is actually as the screen capture from Oregon where he shows so this is the calculated point cloud from aggie soft with his angles so and you can see that the details pretty good so he switches on the the meshing and afterwards he threw it into ZBrush to do the retopo smooth out some of the noise that it 3d scan always produces correct when there's a hole somewhere in the mesh close that reproject new topology on it so that was actually the mesh what we're working with with a pretty high detailed normal map and yeah just prepared everything for us so you also did a nice capture of that so here he switches on the normal map that you can see the high detail there's a totally diffused texture which comes out of photo scan and you can see how close we can get to the surface he also unwrapped the model in ZBrush directly so that we can also edit the texture in Photoshop that was pretty cool because we because it was a macro lens he also captured a lot of like grain and dust on the surface we could paint it out here and this is the diffuse map the speculum above specular map what I was talking about so this is basically the difference between the scan of the shoe with a cross polarization technique and the one without so if you subtract them this is what what stays there so you know exactly where the material is reflective and where it's not it's a little bit retouched of course so we made sure that the the text the logo of mercurial X is fine and those edges here are perfectly sharp but it it helps a lot and gives you a lot of detail there all right yeah so the the shading of the shoe we decided to use octane because all of us we knew octane pretty good and we also knew we were only three guys without a big render from and we had to finish in time so when you using octane if you run out of render power you can build up your render pole pretty easily just by buying some GPUs or borrow it from friends or whatever so it's you can simply double your render power by putting in a second graphics card so in the end I think we had four works workstations and 11 or 12 GPUs different GPUs mix up just to make this whole thing so that was a first proof of concept where we made a short test render just to see how the light reacts on the surface of this shoe so and that was pretty satisfying for being a first test of that render so we were kind of surprised whole gas model was great usually when you do 3d scans of shoes especially shoes with this a very soft fabric on top you have to remodel the shoelaces especially if the shoe has to deform somehow in our case that was very limited so we most of the times we only have a static version of the shoe so we didn't have to care about that but it's pretty hard in 3d scans to get those overlap areas here so with something underneath something and usually you see that but everything was so dark and how your skin was so good so that we didn't have to care about that so that was the proof that we sent over to London and they liked it so that was the second one where we pushed it even further so you can see this is the fabric of our shoe where you can see all the the the strings of the material actually and we made a slide flow over over there just see also here you can see every every single detail of that material and this is everything pure scan data so reat apologize with all the high-res maps ready to use so that's pretty cool on 3d scans so the second hero of our film was the car and of course it should still be a commercial for the shoe and not for the car so I think in the beginning they yeah they had some sports car in the beginning which was some brand with a horse I think and of course that was not what Nike wanted to see so the guys at village screen they have a few more loss in-house so they produced us this a neutral car which is basically a Frankenstein of different cars just parts put together and somehow model it that it looks like a sports car and those rims for example we can see them later in more detail those are Nike rims so they put a lot of very nice detail in there and yeah just made sure that it's not a very specific car it looks pretty similar to other sports cars but it's you can't buy this car sadly we also knew what the car has to do in our film so actually the stuff that the car should be able to do was very limited it just had to drive around and you had to feel some maybe some suspension or you should see on the body itself when it's accelerating that it leans backwards a little bit so the the rig itself was not that complicated and we knew that they want a detailed shading we were super close so it's it's not rocket science it's a car paint shader that we build but they wanted to have some really nice micro scratches on the brakes and there's the material X logo engraved on the brakes also which should be with micro scratches and all that so let's take a look at the scene file so actually I was unsure if I should show this scene file because it's so simple it's nothing fancy but sometimes it's super important just to know what your model has to do this is also why we spend a lot of time in this animatic actually after the 2d animatic when we started creating our 3d scenes we slowly started to exchange previews of the 3d scenes into the 2d animatic so that in the end we had our final piece just not rendered and so we knew what the car had to do and let me just show you about what it can do because it's super simple so we have this main control over here we can simply grab the car and move it around then we have this steering controller over here which is also limited just to a steering nothing fancy and then we have the tires and usually what I tend to do is just create a setup where you can put the car on a spline let it ride and then the tires run automatically in this case we decided not to move the car in the whole spot so actually the cars always still only the street underneath is smooth moving so it was much easier for us just to animate the camera you don't have to build super long sets everything is static and you just move the the street underneath also we didn't have scenes where the car starts riding off very slowly that you can see if the real spin correctly and don't slide on the service surface so we could focus and just make the motion blur look good so we did it simply by hand so this is controller actually is linked to the rotation of all the of all the tires so what we basically did is we went in there made a keyframe and then usually we jump to frame 10 and rotated it a bit something like that made another keyframe and if you now take a look at the F curve let's make this bigger so you you can see that blue curve over here and of course if I now he'll play it runs until the front end and then they stop so this is a function which is super useful most of you might know it but I simply showed so you can see that here's this grey line that which continues and shows you the current value of this animation if you take this whole curve go to functions track after and set it to continue oh sorry that was for wrong drag after continue then you can see that this curve goes up up up all the way and so if I now hit play you will see that the tires will just spin forever and it was pretty cool to have a setup like this so if you if we render the short test sequences and thought okay the motion but it doesn't look so good it should be a little bit faster because sometimes you get this static excess then off off or tire when it rotates in the wrong frequency they simply grab the second keyframe and lift it up a little bit and then you can see that the whole curve changes so that was a pretty easy speed control for us without diving into complex setups the other thing we did was just give every of our tires a vibrate egg because if you have close-ups like this and you hit play and they just spin it looks kind of unnatural but if you let them vibrate like lightly in y direction and they all have different random seeds so you just see them then bouncing a little bit and in a rendered version with motion blur that looks pretty cool actually alright and the last thing what I like most of this setup actually is this controller here on top I do that all the time when I have to animate cars this is a super simple expression setup where we take the position here the position x and y position of this star in relation to this square and when you move that around let me move that around you can simply Bank the car in all those directions and this is a little tweak you don't use that too much but it makes such a huge difference so if you take a look at the car from the side and when you imagine it starts to accelerate you do something like this and then it breaks goes like this that makes a huge difference to have those tiny details also when you have the car like striving around from left right left right and then it simply leans a little bit that you can feel the mass of the body of the car that makes a huge difference and it's a super simple character it solved all of our scenes perfectly so the next thing was the car shading so I'm super glad that the Rafah is always not here today because he is always angry with me if I explain shading stuff in the wrong way and this is definitely wrong but it works so there's a thousand ways to build car paint materials but one way I found and which looked cool at night with those neon lights was that we simply take one base material which is this one which has a very high index so it's very reflective but also very high roughness so it's almost like anodized aluminum or something so very very rough and then you take a second one which has a lower index something like 1.6 it was an hour in our case with a low roof and so it's very glossy very very shiny and then you simply mix them together you can use Afrin L also so fall off to mix them together but recently I think we just mix them and add a slider or we could define how much of each shader we use and that worked perfectly fine in our case so we made this this was I think it's the first scene was also one of our first tests where we tried to make some some reflections crawl over the surface and reveal those nice edges of the car so let me drink something so we were happy with that it looked enough like lasers and neon lights what is also funny is that kind of reflections that were used here because actually we made a photo search in all of our holiday pictures and I've been to Vegas a while back and the friend was also in the US and we took pictures of some neon signs on the streets so we simply took those pictures of neon signs put them on planes and then moved it alongside of the car so this is our reflection cards that we use all the way the next one was the street we knew that we don't need curves or something we just need some Street running underneath the car the client also said they want some wet Street of course because wet streets always look better much better and so we figured out ok let's make one strip of off Street just one one piece that we can put a after each other and then move it underneath the car and we wanted to have some procedural way of creating those water puddles and actually after a while of research I found this one here so on YouTube if you take if you search for blender guru there's a very nice cycle tutorial so cycles render and blender how to create realistic puddles in blender and the good thing is in 3d of course every program has its own ways of doing stuff but some things always work the same and if you follow this tutorial he explains very nicely what it's important in creating this puddles it's not just the noise which is a mask because you have this tiny detail when there's the edge between the dry and the wet surface there's a very blurred area which is not like clear water it's more blue because it's a very thin film and small stones coming through this watch the tutorial he explains it weighs better than me so ultimate extreme capture here so this is rendered on two GPUs in octane and it's just a clever combination of some noises and then I have this transform node on the left side and can change some values change the scale and the position of those puddles pretty quickly so for each shot we could load in this asset and just if we knew okay this puddle is in the way or it doesn't look good in the reflection or we wanted weather in that place we could just move it over make the puddle smaller bigger whatever it was fully procedural and then yeah was there was a nice help in the production yeah so let's watch it to the end I'm just rotating it moving it around so that was really a big help so then we had our car asset and the street asset so it was time for first test to see both in action so that was the first thing we sent to the client over and you can also see our neon signs here and the reflection on the water puddles I thought okay we're pretty sure this would work we're pretty satisfied with the look of it it was super doc usually clients always want to make things bright I don't know why in every film they start super dark and you think yeah that looks like Blade Runner and Tron and terminate at once super cool and then the client thinks in meaning okay maybe we make it a little bit brighter and then in the end you you have something white usually and that was pretty cool that we with that we have this look here until the end alright so that was I would say the most challenging scene of the whole film most of it was done by Martine so big shout out to Martin thanks for helping us here we had to figure out a way how the profile of the tire can morph into the profile of the shoe and we knew okay we have to go super close like this is a graph from the film actually we have to be super close they wanted some kind of transition effects of this glowing edge which should go on and it had to look pretty detailed and we had to control it somehow so that we know where it starts how it transforms in which direction whatever so I have also a little scene file just to explain you the very basic things that we use there so that's a technique that I also used in years back I did my graduation film droplets where I had to produce you were in the presentation right I remember you okay that's that was actually 2012 and I had to to build a rope there and I needed a displacement map for the rope and I was searching how to how to do that and actually I found a tutorial of a guy who built the structure of the robe like on a flat surface he simply modeled it and then he rendered out a depth path of that you get a black and white image which shows you what parts of the image come out of the geometry which not and this is what we did here so Martin started to build this tire structure here just a simple simple model of the tire structure and then he also rebuilt the structure of the shoe so this is how the shoe looks from from the bottom and then we have two cameras both are set to parallel so that you don't have parallax in the render then you set your front and rear blur that you have exactly a gradient which is white at the top and the deeper you go it gets darker so we rendered out some images and they looked like this so we rendered our 16-bit TIFF files that we have in you enough grayscale values in between and then we had it in 2d those are high levels so we knew we can simply unwrap the tire and then throw it on there and it will somehow fit while martin was working on the tire and on the shoe especially so long and he analyzed the this profile of the shoe for quite some time and martin is a film maniac so he watches a lot of films and it's just a funny note on the side that we recognized that they should designers of nike are obviously big fans of the shining because they have the same pattern on the floor alright so the transition itself was prepared an aftereffect so we took those two images Martin unwrapped the tire because we already had some detail on the tire which was a frontal projection from the side which is this this type here and those tiny lines it was already as a bump map projected from the side so he made nice V's then we baked this bump map into this UV space that we have it also flat and then we took it into after-effects layered our two pattern on top of each other and then we could simply create mask animations mixed with noise and all the stuff and made the whole transition in 2d and the key thing for for shading later was also that we didn't only have one displacement map we also had some some layers here so you can see down here it's called emission shot and stroke shot so for example this line here was on a separate layer as a separate sequence that we can use this for the emission of the material that we have the glowing a glowing effect there and that was a huge huge compeer I don't remember actually I think it wasn't we rendered it also out as a 16k comp so very big because we knew we had to go so close and that brought us to the next problem because octane has a limitation and displacement and the limitation is 8 K so you can't use displacement lamps which are higher than 8 K and we recognized ok when we use that and we are so close and the UV map is the whole tire we see pretty big pixels there so we actually can't do it on render time with displacement so what we ended up doing so this is not the final resolution that we used but just to show you cinema 4d has the displacer which is just the deformer which uses image Maps or shaders to displace the actual mesh so not on red on render time tessellation it really pushes your points in space and you see it in viewport so we ended up using this and we took that piece of tire and I think in the end we only took the top part which is visible and subdivided it like very very very very very high I made the transition with that and it looks like this so it was horrible performance in the viewport because the the resolution was so high but we timed it on a low resolution mesh and right before rendering we simply cranked it up so that worked pretty well and helped us in this case yes so the other effect that we wanted to build was this scanline was quite challenging in the beginning in the first parts we always talked about some light sweeping across the shoe the problem is the shoe is not that big and if you move lights there basically if you put a light there you see the shoe it's not so easy possible to create only a small glimpse of the shoe and this in this in this short area so we had to figure out another way and we made a concept with the scanline and as the guys do you like that maybe with a scanline going over it I mean we talked about lasers and stuff so this might be a good idea so we had to figure out how to build a laser line the other thing we wanted to make is if you have ever seen a laser show life and they have this big laser walls moving through the fork you can always see that there's some it looks like a slice from a cloud and the laser moves through it so we wanted to have that also it's it's actually not that obvious but we have a little bit of noise going on here and we wanted to have some dust particles in the air why the lasers are sweeping across it that they just come into the light for one frame so let me show you the set up for the that was wrong the set up for the laser scan it's highly complicated because it looks like this so actually you can ignore that so we tried different things as I said to create this sharp line which glows and in best case close and creates light so emission and glows around on the surface on the shoe so what we ended up using was simply a plane and this plane had an emissive material in octane so it was just a 100% glowing plane and then we put a door trader in the alpha channels on the opacity channel of this plane so wherever the dirt return octane is basically a meal occlusion so wherever the plane intersects with the shoe it will create a small line in the alpha channel so only where we have an intersection it is visible and by default that's a like a feathered line which goes until here or something but you can crank this gradient down that it generates a very sharp line so basically we pushed a glowing plane through our shoe and wherever they intersect it would it will create a very small emissive line and that worked pretty well and we could use it in all the shots also in the one shot where we have light traveling through the sole of the shoe there was a little bit heavier and render times but it still worked pretty good all right so that was first test of our volume Fox so if I play that you know what I mean so this is the effect that we were looking for and I I don't know why I didn't try that earlier but my first test for with turbulence ft creating some volumes really scatter light through it render times exploded we don't have time everyone cries so we had to find another solution for that and the simple solution was simply create a noise in world space and then move the plane through this noise so it's actually a static noise sitting in world space so if you have a noise which lives in texture or an object space and then you move your object the noise moves with it but if your noise is in world space you can move an object through it and the noise is static in the air so that's the whole magic behind that actually and it was simply the noise world space in the opacity of our emissive plane and then you get this effect here also pretty easy to render them then we took our rendered layers into After Effects and then there was a lot of post work so we had our shoe with the with the light from the line on the shoe but the line itself was on a separate layer and I threw that into After Effects and those rays here are actually just trap called shine so with a with the center of the shine and somewhere down here just to create them and then we want to create those dust particles which are obviously only visible in this area where our laser is just at the moment so we created some particles in the whole image and made them had gave them a lifetime of one frame so they really just sparkled very shortly and then we used only the shine layer cranked up the the contrast so wherever we have laser lines we get a black and white image which had super high contrast and simply use that as a mask for particles so the rest was just messed off and since our laser was constantly moving we knew the particles only had to spark for one frame so that worked out pretty good I need to drink so next scene that we had to take over the dipper notes we had one in the beginning and this one we called it the donut rift in the end we use turbulence FD in the past and I think it's still the best thing to produce smoke and fire and cinema4d so we used that tool and sadly at the time when we started production there was no octane 3 with volume support volume render support so we were kind of forced to use two different vendors and Comp them together in post so it was rendered with physical renderer and I have a little example also I mean the stuff that we did as I said it's not rocket science and sometimes the most easiest setups are the most helpful so let me show you this high end scene file here this is the torus I made it by myself ok yes thank you thank you very much i this is actually the real asset from the burnout scene in the beginning we knew that we need to produce this Pernod and when you have a spinning tire from the side let's see it like this and you make a burnout you actually produce heat down here where the rubber goes over the over the street and then your your smoke will be produced here and then it will rise up here because the tire is spinning right so it produces some force and rises up there in our first test that simply didn't happen because we didn't make the tire a Collider of the smoke otherwise they hold villains field gets way too crazy and we wanted to control pretty good where they where the thing is let me just make this one a little bit bigger so what happened then we came up with this solution which looks like this so basically we cloned some cubes on our surface of the tire so if I disable the plane effect it looks like this so it's just cubes on the surface because you also want to emit the smoke and a little bit random ways are not same emission on all the places and with this effector we could simply control when the emission starts because those little cubes were our smoke emitters actually and they were also colliders for the smoke so when the cubes made their round and go through the smoke again they start to pull the smoke in the direction where they are rotating so and with this plane affected it was then super easy just animated like that we could just said okay we want smoke until here and then it gets just pulled around the timer so that was actually the smoke setup for that one so this is the raw simulation for the donut rift this is done by Bastion we produce we actually modeled a low-res version of the car just with a polygon pan and cinema 4d we did a proxy geometry to make it a Collider put some proxy tires in there and the tires were our emitters and then we simply tried and watched what happens if we simply make them colliders and let it drift and this is I think the first simulation that we had and also the last one because the it works so nicely and those curls over here are just produced by this Collider going through your simulation space and creating some vortex forces in your velocity field so that was pretty satisfying that we had that and this is the final shot so here we also use the the puddle technique for making the the street underneath I just painted some tire marks in here and on one tire mark if it would zoom in like thousand percent we could read a bastion margin in Simon so this is what the client did knew until now yeah so that was also pretty good so for us it was solved then we had this drift in the end where the tire slides into into the frame which is the final image and it also teaches us that it's so important to exactly know what you want to achieve animatic helps a lot and then you only build what you need it doesn't make sense we tried in the beginning to use our cash from the donut scene and really just make the car stop in the end and then simply put a camera there and we pretty we first recognized okay that doesn't make sense because the whole space is filled up with smoke the car comes in there it looks like a cars burning because there's smoke everywhere and you see nothing and it had to look it had to look in a very specific way so we ended up with this scene here it's not correct definitely not but it looked how we wanted so we placed some small smoke emitters here on the front and pushed it towards the car and then the car itself pulled some emitted smoke in our direction and so that was the final shot unfortunately you can see that the car drifts in and goes off to the left that was the scene how it looked like for most time of the production pretty much in the end the client decided to flip the scene where you think that's not a big problem we rendered everything already but then you flip the scene and then you recognize that you have some strange-looking Nikes bushes everywhere so we had to re-render because we couldn't we try to flip all the logos and stuff in post but that was simply too much so we had to re-render that shot it's much better in that direction um funny enough I told you that it's so important to have a short list that everyone knows what you're talking about when you say shot 25 and everyone is like a shot 25 this is actually the only shot that no one know the number because we always called it the Back to the Future drift because actually our reference was back to the future so if you take a look at this drift this is exactly our shot so inspired let's call it inspired not stolen and this is this short sequences as it looks rendered and then it goes off to the right so the peg shot was another big challenge the problem was that there was a print campaign out there which basically looked like this and of course they didn't use a 3d render of the shoe they used the photo of the shoe and this photo was very heavily retouched of course because it's a the official photo of that shoe and it's almost impossible to get this light situation of a shoe in 3d if you try to if you use physically-based renders and try to rebuild some lights and it's just impossible to get this look so what we ended up was we tried to push it as close as we can our render off the shoe then we took a still of the shoe send it over to the guy who made the retouch of the photo to make a retouch of our render so it just tried to rebuild this look and then he send it back to us and while this shoe is coming in from the left it's our animation but it's super dark and then it blends over in the retouched CG render of our shoe just to match the print campaign did I miss something no so um time is good we learned some stuff on this project and I just wanted to share it because yeah you can never learn enough one is what I already said spend enough time on the animatic it really really helps to plan everything use layout sound just grab some from movies or whatever and put them in the Edit you just get so much better feeling for the whole film second thing is create a shot list update the shortest don't create it once and then leave it somewhere because it looks good and short names in ten steps I already said that we use the review platform that helps a lot we actually used frame I oh I don't want to do too much advertising here but it's a platform where you can upload shots the client can review it contained until the picture can give notes and that's so much better instead of getting like trillions of emails and the last tip sounds weights easier than it's meant I wrote down make friends not clients so basically we have a super super good connection with the guys from village green I think they're also watching so high it was very nice we had Skype conversations with them all day long and a lot of clients say yeah when this project is done we should have a beer together and of course we were in Germany they were in London and they also said that and we thought ok this will probably never happen but actually two weeks I think after we finished the project Sebastian which is the buster called me and said yeah we are coming on Tuesday say all right you're coming on Tuesday so the two guys jumped in the Train and came for one day two mines and I wrote down mega bicycle tour because actually we did and it was amazing so it really strengthens the the connection between you and your clients and it's so much better to work together instead of for each other so this is the team this is zap this is Martin Somers busty this is dusty so this is me and here we have Tom so it was a fantastic project and to end my my talk can i yeah I have we just produced a little breakdown of this whole project it's the making off you will see some shots that didn't make it into the final edit but I thought it might still be interesting to wrap everything what I told now up obviously pops up on a folder this that's okay so thank you very much for listening if anyone of you has questions you can ask them now or I'll be at the booth so you can ask me there also this is me yeah sure I can play it again where is it that's wrong I'll take a picture for my mom she laughed up thank you very much now stop everybody states where he or she is because he's got a picture for his mom I need one for my boss please please pretend that you're very happy and you enjoyed this presentation who raised your arms don't you have some goodies to give away some excellent shirts or raise your arms everybody come on here yeah that's cool how did you like the presentation it was awesome thanks guys thank you yeah one question how long did it how long did this process take their production um there were Christmas holidays in between and stuff I would say pure production times something between three and a half and four months something like that I think it took a little bit longer because we had some breaks and stuff but your production time should be something around that any questions three so me and the two other guys so the the question was how many people worked on this right so actually our core team were three people then we had Holger who did the 3d scan which was an additional guy and the two guys at Village Green who did the art direction and as I said the the contact with them were was amazing so we I would say we are more friends than clients and you have a mousepad that's great there's another question why why did you choose obtain over other renders y-yeah okay I mean reason one for octane was we were pretty familiar with octane we used it in the past and the other thing was really that we knew we had to render a ton of stuff and we had a lot of GPUs lying around in our office and if it gets close to the deadline and you realize okay we need more you don't have to buy new render client to just buy some more GPUs and that was the case here so that was a good thing all right so thanks again Thank You C Mon you

Channel: Maxon

Views: 205,297

Keywords: MAXON, Cinema 4D, IBC, IBC 2016, Presentation, 3D, Animation, Motion Graphics, Simon Fiedler, Nike, MercurialX, Commercial, TV Spot

Id: 3yUMtqDUpKk

Length: 55min 32sec (3332 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 28 2016