Project Challenge: BMW Refuel

BMW Refuel Commercial

I recently had the privilege to supervise a very fun commercial for BMW. It also marked the second time I got to work with Eric Barba (VFX sup) and Joeseph Kosinski (Director).

This project wasn't all that challenging as projects go, but it was a lot of fun. In the early stages of the project I was asked to head out to Riverside CA to an aircraft museum and shoot reference pictures and textures of a KC135 stratotanker. At the time we were planning on having one fully CG shot that would be from inside the boom operators station. So we asked for permission to actually go inside the plane and take pictures. Fortunately, our contact at the museum not only allowed it, but used to be a boom operator himself. My co-worker and I spent a good 3-4 hours documenting every inch of that aircraft while our guide told us about his experiences as a boom operator and showed us how things worked on the plane. It was really cool to get to crawl into the underbelly of the plane and into the boom operators seat (if you can call it that since you lay on your chest) and get a lesson on how to operate the fuel boom. I'd never seen the inside of boom operators station before and let me just say...It is really small and tight. You basically lay down on the floor of the aircraft and then slide sideways onto this very narrow seat. You lay on your stomach on what I can only describe as being similar to a very narrow masseuses table. You place your chin on a chin rest and your arms dangle down on either side of this thing to operate the controls. It was very claustrophobic in there. Right next to the museum is an airforce base where KC135's were taking off and doing touch and go's right next to us. So we were able to get some great pictures of the latest models of the plane in action.

As far as the visual effects went we pretty much were just dealing with a CG plane and car. For most shots all we needed to do was animate the plane and cast shadows on the ground. These were very straight forward shots but it did become a bit of a challenge to get the plane to look like it was flying at a slow enough speed to both match the car and still stay in the air. Ultimately though it is sometimes more important to make the plane just look great instead of be 100% accurate. The plane model itself was very detailed. The tail section of the plane and boom operators station were the most detailed because we got the best look at those areas. The boom operators station was modeled down to individual bolts and screw heads. The flaps and ailerons on the wings even had the mechanisms inside that drive them modeled and rigged up so that they moved and hinged correctly so we could see glimpses of the pistons and mechanics inside as they moved. Because of the amount of detail this plane model needed and a very short schedule I teamed up with our lead modeler and we both tackled different parts of the model and combined the different parts in the end. He handled the fuselage, wings and tail, while I modeled the boom operators station, boom and retractable boom nozzle.

We were never planning to actually render the car itself. We only intended to use it for getting shadows from the plane to cast properly over the live action car. We did end up rendering a CG car for one shot in which the plane flies over the car and we needed to see the car in shadow. In that shot the live action car was lit by bright sunlight and we couldn't just grade the car down because the sun was clearly visible in the reflection. So for that one shot we rendered the CG car with the shadow of the plane creeping over it. Then in the comp we used a shadow pass to blend between the live action car and the CG car in shadow. Major cudos to our compositor who seamlessly blended the live action with the CG in that shot.

This project really was a blast to work on. Even though the schedule was short we had a great team of artists who had a lot of experience and just made everything go very smoothly. The lighters got to wear many hats on this show which was great. The three of us did all of the animation, modeling, texturing, lighting and FX. :)

Recent work

Recently two projects I had the pleasure to work on were released. A commercial for Nicorette, and the debut trailer for Gears of War 3. My first cinematic done completely in-engine.


Nicorette

Gears of War 3

VES Award for DD's commercial work

Digital Domains commercials department won the VES award for "Outstanding Visual Effects in a Commercial" this year for the Audi "Intelligently Combined" spot we created. Congrats to the whole team!! It was a beautiful spot and a real pleasure to be a part of.

VES awards!

The Audi Rubix commercial we worked on here at Digital Domain was nominated for a VES award for "Oustanding Visual Effects in a Commercial."

AUDI - Intelligently Combined
Jay Barton, Visual Effects Supervisor
Rafael F. Colon, Sr. Compositor
Chris Fieldhouse, Visual Effects Producer
Ronald Herbst, CG Supervisor

Here is the commercial itself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=AFHk3JU_pcs

Promotion

I was officially promoted to CG Supervisor yesterday. I start my first project Monday. :)

Project Challenge: Disney Jungle

I had the pleasure of working on a very cool spot for Disney recently. The project was called "Jungle" and it was our job to take many of the animals from the world famous Disney jungle boat ride and do photo real CG head replacements for them so that they could be made to talk in the commercial. On this project I was the lead lighting artist and assistant CG supervisor. Near the end of the show I had to step in as CG sup when my good friend Richard's (senior CG sup on the project) wife went into labor.

Right off the bat I knew this project was going to test me. It was entirely character work which I've done very little of over the years. My first task was to model the face of the baby gorilla who at the time had the most dialog in the entire spot. So I put my character modeling skills to the test and modeled up the little guys face. My second task was to model the zebra's heads which also had a lot of dialog and we would see some close up shots of them. After the models were approved I moved onto morph targets. All the while we had two other artists modeling the other characters. In total we created 3 gorillas, 1 zebra, 1 lion, 1 lioness, 1 elephant, 1 tucan, 1 giraffe and 1 wildebeest. The models and lookdev was moving along very smoothly. There was just one problem at this point. We were never budgeted to do fur. All of these animals were actually rubber animatronics so they didn't have fur on their faces. The only exception to that was the zebra's manes and some whiskers on the lions. So I set out to find a way to create the fur. At first I went with a simple approach of using a bunch of cards with hair strands mapped on them. This was ok...but it really didn't look too realistic. We didn't have a fur solution that we could render in Maya/Vray so we needed to come up with some way of creating geometry that we could style and use. That's when I remembered my good friend 3dsmax. I took the zebra model into Max and used Max's hair and fur tool to create the zebra's mane. The bummer was that in Max the hair and fur tool does not create uv's...I just uses the color of the texture the hair is grown from to give the hair its color. Since I needed this to get rendered in Maya, I needed UV's so that I could have the black and white zebra stripes. I exported the geometry back to Maya and in a side view I planar projected UV's...Then I went in by hand and selected all the hairs that grew out of the black stripes on the head and moved their UV's to one side of the UV layout and all the white hairs to the other side of the UV layout. Then a simple texture map that was black on one side and white on the other was used to created the diffuse color of the hairs. This approach looked a million times better than the cards, but it was a longer render. It also allowed us to get backscattering on the hair and make them translucent.

Our pipeline had recently been given a major overhaul and we now had tools in place that made bringing in characters and animation into our lighting scenes a snap. It was literally a 3 click process for each character in the scene and you were ready to go. The lighting was all done using HDRI probes that were taken on set in Disneyland. A few extra area lights were used in some shots, but for the most part it was just a vray dome light with the HDR mapped to it.

midway through the project we got an updated cut of the commercial and realized large portions of the spot now had new dialog, characters that were not originally talking now had tons of lines and the characters that were talking the most before no longer were. This required us to go back in and create lots more morph targets and also look at what turned out to be the biggest challenge on the spot...The wildebeest.

The wildebeest was only ever intended to have one line...He was to say "huh?" We planned to do a 2d warp of his mouth in Flame, but now this character was saying all kinds of stuff. So we now faced a huge problem...This characters head is totally covered with scraggly hair. His lips barely were visible through his mustache. This now put a huge burden on our Flame artist and several of us 3d guys set out to create a mouth with morph targets that we could use to replace the lower half of the wildebeests head. We though maybe we could get away with only replacing the lower jaw. This worked ok, but it didn't look right that the upper jaw and nose did not deform at all (because we were just seeing the original plate photography). So we decided to try camera mapping the plate onto a larger model that included the upper jaw and nose as well as the lower jaw. This turned out to be really tricky to make look right. It even required us at one point to scrap the model and morph targets we had and start over. We needed our CG model to match as closely as we possibly could to the actual wildebeest in the plate. We eventually got it and started cranking out elements to pass to Flame. In Flame we still had a lot of 2d warping to do to marry the CG and the plate properly. In the end I think it turned out pretty well for having such a short amount of time to do it in, and never having planned or budgeted for this character to talk.

With our new pipeline tools in place the project went very smoothly. We were able to build shots and update them in no time. Even rebuilding a shot from scratch only took a couple minutes. At the end of this project the senior CG sup had to hand the project over to me when his baby was born. So the last weekend of the project and final delivery was in my hands. By that point everything was pretty much done and it was just down to the wildebeest shots. We delivered the project on time and I'm very proud of the team and the work that we did. Its one of my favorite projects that I've worked on during my time here at DD.

Tim

Project Challenge: Audi "Rubix"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=AFHk3JU_pcs

In this project challenge I'm going to cover my experience working on a commercial for Audi. At the time of writing this the commercial was not released and I do not have a link to it. Hopefully I'll get a link sometime soon after its release. You have to see it to appreciate it I think.

In this commercial we were asked to do every raytracers worst nightmare. Create a photo-real 9x9x9 glass rubix cube full of car parts in a photo-real CG environment. Then animate the cube rotating around and assembling the car as it spins until the car is completely built. For anyone keeping score...A 9x9x9 grid of boxes means that we had 729 cubes, each with at least one object inside it and most of them having several objects. Each individual cube had realistically modeled sides made of glass, which means we were seeing through a minimum of 36 panes and even more if viewing from an angle. So...729 cubes, made of 6 objects each. At least 3 times as many part objects. That put us at 26,244 nodes, just for the geometry of the cube and parts. Once you throw in the nodes for the environment and cube rig I can't even come up with that number...but these were some HUGE files to work in. Probably the most complex I've ever worked with.

When the project began I was one of the first modelers/lighters to start on it. There was a lot of uncertainty about what the environment should be like. It needed to not distract from the cubes, but also look good in its own right. Myself and two other lighters modeled up rough environments with temp glass cubes in it every day for a week or two. All similar but also quite different. As things progressed the environments that kept getting the most response were the very simple plain white rooms. In the beginning these all had white artificial lighting and no natural light sources. We went this direction for a long time, but when you put a glass cube in an evenly lit white room it disappears. We needed to have contrast in the scene in order for the glass to look like glass. I was pulled off of the environment for a week or so while the client, director and supervisors all worked out what they thought the environment should be. I was put on the task of creating the cubes and their glass shaders. At first I went with a totally realistic approach. I modeled all the sides of the glass cubes and stuck them up against each other. I put a realistic glass shader on them and hit render. Now I've never seen an actual 9x9x9 glass rubix cube before so I was a little suprised at first to find that the center of the cube was very dark. It was like the light just couldn't penetrate into the glass. I made the glass totally transparent and fresnel reflection at 100%, but it still had the same problem. The only way to make the center of the glass not get dark was to reduce the IOR for reflections and refractions. So I started breaking reality and it was starting to look better. After I had something kinda working I started adding a slight bump map near the edges of the cubes because I noticed in my glass reference on my desk that towards the corners the glass was warped a bit when the pieces were fused together. As soon as I did this it became aparent that with as many refractions as we needed you couldn't see through the cube again. Parts just became invisible inside all the crazy refractions. Not only that, but the rendertime suffered an almost 200% increase.

Eventually the environment was sorted out again and because I have architecture experience I was taken off the cube glass set up and put back on environments. Another artist took over the glass set up and came up with some nice looking results that totally broke reality, but that didn't matter because it looked good. I worked on variation after variation on the environment nearly right up until it delivered. At one point we finally decided that there wasn't going to be a good way to make the artificial lighting look good. We ripped open some holes in the ceiling and I was told to light the thing naturally. I think that was the best decision we made on the job, it really changed the look of the project and finally it was working.

In the meantime the other lighter who took over the cubes was getting creative with ways to reduce the rendertimes and still get great results. He came up with a great solution, but unfortunatly it was very complex. It was still faster than just waiting for frames though. His solution was to render the parts all by themselves without any glass in the scene. We did this three times. Once with an HDR generated from the actual 3d environment I built. A second time with an HDR of a studio lighting setup, and finally a third that only had a big area light above the parts. Our compositors would blend these three passes together over the environment background render until the parts looked cool. Then they would render an un-premultiplied pass of the parts back out for the lighters. The lighters took that pass into our cubes scenes and projection mapped it from the shot camera back onto the parts. Then we deleted all lighting from the scene. Only the glass cubes and projection mapped parts. This was rendered with the HDR of the CG environment for reflections and refractions. We still needed the ability to render mattes for the compositors, so we had to make scenes that had everything black except the parts which were 100% illuminated white. We also did an extra pass which was just the connecting edges of the glass cubes. This pass was used to tint only the fused faces of the glass cubes to have a greenish hue.