Catching up

Time is flying by. We finished up that previous photo real project I was mentioning in my last post. It was a commercial for LG brand televisions. The commercial featured a bunch of robots made up of parts from inside the television. They come to life late at night in the living room of a modern looking home and have themselves a little rave party. Then the owners of the house come home and they all scurry back into the television and hide. The designs for the robots were pretty cool and were VERY highly detailed. The commercial featured live action background plates with CG robots. This project was animated in Maya, with all the lighting and rendering done in Max/Vray. It was refreshing to be back in software that I knew very well. The project went very smoothly once all the characters were approved. All the characters were highly reflective and had a large range of material types on them. Everything from chrome and etched metals to glass, plastics, translucent bits and glowing LED lights. I learned a fair amount about eliminating grain in Vray on this project. Rendertimes were fantastic considering the complexity. We were using full 360 HDR light rigs with GI, glossy reflections, glossy refractions, translucency, 3d motion blur and DOF all rendered in camera. The longest frame times were just under 4 hours for shots where the character completely filled the frame. Most shots were 45 minutes or less for final renders. The commercial is being shown over seas, unfortunately. I'm not sure when or if it will be shown here in the US.

I'm currently working on a commercial for Sobe which will be shown durring the super bowl. This project is pretty intense. We're nearing the end though. I can't give any details about it yet, but it is being animated in Maya and rendered out of Lightwave. I was a little worried jumping back into Lightwave after being out of it on the LG spot for a couple months. Suprisingly, it all came back to me pretty quickly. We're about a week away from delivery and unless there are some last minute "gotcha's" we should deliver right on time. Now that I said that I'm sure to get a big list of notes ;) .

There is a pretty good chance on the next project I'm on I'll be modeling the main character. Should be interesting considering I'm more of an environment/lighting guy. I'm learning that Blur's artists are a lot more specialized than here at DD (at least in commercials). A generalist here really does do some of everything.