New Gatorade spot, done with C4D

[JoelOtron]

Fantastic work there Francky!
I hope the mods plug it

Any more production info you could share? How was rendering animation with VRAY?

[Sneaker]

That looks fantastic.
Great work!

-Michael

[vid2k2]

I like it.
Always good to see C4D used in a production pipeline.

[Francky]

Thanks guys,

To answer your question Joel, I was a bit nervous rendering the animation with Vray. But as you can see, the animation is REALLY fast. So much so, than any flicker created by GI is all but invisible. So what I had assumed would be crazy render times, turned out to be the opposite and render was a breeze, as I left the settings quite low. The only scene where it was "problematic" was the close up of the face, where you could see some flicker on the tongue. A couple of brush strokes in After Effect took care of that :p

All and all, it took us 5 weeks to do this spot. I had a big team, the biggest I've ever had for a project, as we had a total of 8 people work on this. 3 for compositing, 3 animators and 1 modeler and Me (lighting, texturing, rigging and all other TD stuff). I usually try to keep it to a 2-3 men operation. But the small time frame for such a project dictated otherwise. So my render farm was converted into workstations, upgraded the server and away we went.

This, for me, was also a trial run for C4D in a production environment. I had used it on simple things, but wanted to see how it would hold up in a production environment. I wasn't worried about getting the job done, but wanted to see what quirks would surface once pushed more than the small things I had done in the past with it. I did learn, way to late in production that it doesn't support motion vectors for deforming geometry, Ouch! That and a bunch of other quirk surfaced...

A thing that was new to me on this project, was doing color correction, as all the footage (the forest shots) had to be Color corrected to match the look the client wanted. Having Final Cut, I had played around in Color, but never had a chance to work with it until now. It was really fun to do. We had tried doing the color correction in comp, while comping everything, but realized that it didn't have the best tools to judge if each shot matched, we where getting inconsistent colors between shots. CC everything at once, turned out the best way to get the best result. For the next project, I plan to also CC the rendered 3D, as it would be possible to superimpose the 3D over the live plates and CC both. Right now the 3D was matched with the CC live in comp. We also determined that CC the final comp wouldn't be the best, as the Dragons would have been a nice shade of Green, D'oh!

[JustinB]

Hey Francky. Well done on the new spot! Great work. Hope you'll be staying with C4D now you know how it handles in the production environment. :thumbsup:

Cheers
Justin

[benytone]

Hi Francky, really nice work mate...congrats :thumbsup:
beside animation, i really like the high quality color correction work :love:


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[Horganovski]

Very nice work ! :cool:

Did you use a spline wrap for the dragons or were they rigged with skeletons?

Cheers,
Brian

[jablinko]

i really like how you have subtle motion in some of the peripheral parts of the frame away from the central focus.

is is possible to post a higher rez encode of this spot, the encode especilly on the forest bit seems to lose some detail that i for one would love to see

great stuff!

[Francky]

Justin, thanks for the comments, I must admit, you are one of the reasons I'm on C4D now, you work opened my eyes as to what C4D could do :)

benytone, thanks for the praise on the CC, most of the praise should go to "Color" though, that soft made it so easy, I felt like I was cheating while doing it, hehe

Brian, Spline wrap was used, but on part of the rig... I had a pretty crazy rig on this. As the animators wanted to have it follow a spline, but at the same time be independent and move freely if need be. So I had a long box, spline wrapped to an animatable spline and then the dragon rig was surfaced constraint to that box. Only problem with this setup was that it would work in viewport, but wouldn't actually render ok. If you want it, the rig is actually available on this forum, as I had to ask around to get it to render. (One of the quiks that surfaced... :))
The real solution turned out to be, baking the "guide box" before rendering....

jablinko, are you talking about the leaf being blown and the trees being shaken ? A cleaner compression wouldn't make it much more visible. But maybe the HD version I'll start doing, in a week or so, might be cleaner ;)

[lllab]

wow francky, this is wonderfull!!!

excellent work, makes me happy vray turned out fine for you, the animation and the gi and light is also very nice:-)

cheers
stefan

[Horganovski]

Many thanks for the info about the rig, I think I did see that file you mentioned, must have a look at it again. I rigged a rattlesnake a while back and made a quick 'slither' rig using a combination of xpresso and a mograph cloner but then the movement it was making was a lot less elaborate!

Cheers,
Brian

[jablinko]

so outside of the dragons and falling leaves, how much of the bamboo world was plate / cg

what did you use for motion tracking?

love how there is a graffiti dragon near the ball in the final shot

[Fede]

Awesome spot! been looking forward to this since you mentioned it and can really say I'm impressed. I think it looks awesome and really well executed.

Was the forest shot or CG?

Hope you do decide to stick with Cinema as I'd really love to see more of your work done with it. Plus as you know, Vray will be fixing the motion vector issue in the next update!

[Francky]

Hi Federico :)

The forest was Shot, but looked quite different, as all light beam effects and foreground fog were added in comp. That's the reason we needed so many comp guys, as one's only job was to create the masks for the FG trees. (While the third one did the Fireball and neck/eye effect) The falling leaves were CG in some shots and live footage in others. All the shots where color corrected before comp, which gives it this surreal look.

The exploding bamboo was shot on blue screen, color corrected to bring out the white of the smoke and then comped.

Yes I'm sure I'll be sticking with C4D. Though I can only hope some bad quirks in it will be fixed. Like the motion vector thing. But as you mention Federico, the next Vray should have working Motion blur on rigged geometry. I don't know if it will be able to also generate motion vectors also, as creating real motion blur could be time intensive.

I actually compiled a list of C4D quirks while working on this job, (half bug list, half feature request, lol) I need to send it to them :)

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