Computer Graphics World

April 2009 16 n n n n Broadcast•Stereo member 2008's aerial struggle between the Stewie and Charlie Brown balloons in the Macy's parade?) is year, Coca-Cola played with the idea of computer avatars, young adults, and Coke as the beverage that brings people together. In a charming, free-flowing spot, people transform into self-absorbed avatars as they move about their daily business in New York City. A young man navigates the lonely crowd and enters a diner, where he reaches for a Coke and transforms the avatar next to him into a lovely young lady. "Coke opens happi- ness" is the tagline. Nexus Productions shot the live ac- tion and produced all the CG avatars, while Framestore CFC London did the compositing. Ben Cowell, Nexus head of 3D, first looked at the agency brief for the commercial in August, and spoke to Nexus' directors Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes about the look. "ey described the spot as though it were all shot for real, as though we really found a part of a city somewhere in the world where everyone was plugged into their devices," says Cowell. "e camera would be a passive observer—much like our hero." Smith and Foulkes also described how the people would transform into their avatars through the use of 3D pixels or voxels, while Cowell, Matt Clark, and Luis San Juan Pallares wrote the software that would achieve that. "at way, we could then animate this effect over time to create the transformation," explains Cowell, who describes how the real peo- ple turn into game avatars. on. "When you have all these layers shot at different times, we had to come up with a common scene file, to put everything in the correct place," says Barton. "It had to work for everyone, and we created a 3D scene that we could all work on for all the characters." McNally reports that Digital Domain took the camera data from 3ality and gave it to him. "We then put in our characters—The Missing Link, Dr. Cockroach, and BOB—and sent it to Digital Domain," he says. DreamWorks' main animator for the movie Monsters vs. Aliens is David Burgess, and he took on the "Lizard Lake" shots as the sole animator, working for a two- to three-week period, with lots of back and forth with Digital Domain. Both Barton and McNally note that working with director Ar- nell isn't a typical experience. "Every time we'd see a new shot, there would be 10 more lizards in it," says McNally. "Luckily for us, Digital Domain was in control of the SoBe lizards. We had five shots that our characters were in, so we had relatively light work. Digital Domain did the heavy lifting." In addition to its 20 shots, Digital Domain also created 3D backgrounds for every shot, which boiled down to rendering elements for nearly 40 shots total. "We continued creating our 3D scenes and comps to make sure all the live-action charac- ters fit in the stage, while we developed what that stage would be," he explains. "The director has a real designer's eye and was particular about the values we used in the background." The lizards were also updated from last year's Super Bowl and Summer Magic spots with Naomi Campbell. "We used new technologies," says Barton. "It was more about the way we created our displacement maps. We've always had sub- division surface characters with displacement maps for texture. For this spot, we gave more details by repainting the displace- ment maps. We also added new wardrobe: the whole football uniform with cuffs, shoulder pads, and helmets for the football- playing lizards. We also did the cheerleader uniforms and pom- poms, and a tuxedo for the conductor lizard." All of Digital Domain's character animation was set up in Maya and exported out and rendered through NewTek's LightWave. "All our coloring, lighting, and texturing was done in LightWave," says Barton. "It was a combination of the right tool for the job and the preference of the available artist." Meanwhile, the team used Side Effects Software's Houdini for the fluid simulation of the drink flying out of the SoBe bottle. At the beginning when the curtains open, the artists employed Maya nCloth to move the curtains, after which they piped the imagery through Houdini to get even more breakup and wrinkle action after the fact. Compositing software Nuke also played an instrumental role. The spot "Avatar" incorporates approximately 60 CG characters, each a reflection of the world from which it resides, into live plates. They were lit with HDR maps captured on set.

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