Computer Graphics World

March / April 2015

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14 cgw m a r c h . a p r i l 2 0 1 5 these motions. "We spent a lot of time on the rig and the cloth simulation on top of it, which was key in terms of creating this type of character made of cloth," he explains. "We went through many iterations and continued to tweak the rig during production." Following the shoot, the team continued to squeeze more and more emotion out of the characters. "It was clear from the director that emotion was key," Harrison-Murray says. "He didn't want a cold narrative." The characters were modeled and animated in Autodesk's Maya. Texturing was done mainly with Adobe's Photoshop, in addition to Mari from The Foundry. Maya nCloth was used for the simulation of the shirt material. All the ren- dering was done in Solid Angle's Arnold; compositing in The Foundry's Nuke. For the majority of the tracking, the group used Science-D-Visions' 3DEqualizer. In shots where the CG T-shirts became wet, such as when some of the birds are landing and taking flight from the river and sea, the digital artists introduced digital water using Side Effects' Houdini. "I believe we achieved the goal of finding a way to suspend a person's belief, and a lot of it hinged on how much to dial in the cloth effects and how much we would fill in the underlying animation of the T-shirts," says Harrison-Murray. "We didn't want them flapping around in the wind and not have any mus- cular power to them. But, too lit- tle and it would have looked like a body without a head. There was a thin line to making it feel like a dynamic piece of cloth." Unlike the characters, the backgrounds are natural. The spot was filmed in multiple locations throughout England as well as Sweden and Scotland, although some of the land- scapes were graded to appear more winter-like. "You can't help but feel the suffering of the T-shirts and their drive to keep on flying," says Harrison-Murray. "It takes a great animator to get that kind of magic out of a T-shirt." Nissan's Winter Allies So-called bad weather can take many forms: sleet, ice, snow, hail…. In a commercial for Nissan, the manufacturer's crossover vehicles each take on a harsh road condition that manifests in the form of a CG character. "We were asked to create four different monsters that represent bad weather: potholes with teeth snapping up at the cars, a mud monster emerging from the saturated earth, a snowy tree monster, and an ice-laden bridge with cables snapping and waving like tentacles," says Vicky Osborn, MPC Advertising's VFX supervi- sor and CG lead on the spot. The commercial that aired during the Super Bowl featured all four scenarios, though it was generated as a compilation of three separate commercials, along with the pothole se- quence created special for the Super Bowl version. The majority of the work was done in MPC's New York studio with a team of approximately five CG artists and four com- positors using The Foundry's Nuke and Autodesk's Flame as they tackled the individual spots. MPC's LA studio handled most of digital work for the icy bridge sequence. The 60-sec- ond compilation contains close to 100 VFX shots. In all the encounters, the Nissan vehicles are real, as are the basic environments shot on location. The CG artists later made the real environ- ments more treacherous and built the location-specific monsters that interacted with the practical vehicles. All the modeling and anima- tion was done in Autodesk's Maya. Nuke and Flame were used for compositing the effects, Vicon's Boujou for tracking. Rendering was accom- plished with Nvidia's Mental Ray, Side Effects' Mantra, and Solid Angle's Arnold. Side Effects' Houdini provided the simulations that appear in each encounter. The monster shapes were exported from Maya into Houdini. For the mud mon- ster sequence, the team also exported into Houdini the Maya animation showing the beast grabbing at the car, making it seem as if the mud was moving ARTISTS USED A FILM PLATE (TOP) AND ADDED A CG CHARACTER TO THE SCENE (BOTTOM).

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