Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/663385
20 cgw m a r c h . a p r i l 2 0 1 6 But there was a lot of dream logic, where nothing really made sense. And with that going on, the car just leads you through the environments while you witness all these hallucinogenic things happening all around you," he says. Terni points out that the studio oen designs in 3D, as most of the directors are 3D artists themselves. As a result, there was no restriction on ideas or concepts – there was always someone to rig, model, and ani- mate. Many background objects are abstract, but there are also some interesting choreographed motion of abstract mechanisms based on things from the real world and the language of driv- ing, especially in the first half of the spot. In the second half, the designs were inspired by Rube Goldberg mechanisms that continued the action. "In some cases, we just ran with an idea on the fly, and one of the directors would make something or we would talk to the team and repurpose some- thing to create a new object," says Terni. "It gave us a lot of flexibility. Since we designed in 3D, we were able to incorporate things into the film that we felt improved it, without following a checklist of specifics we wanted to include. The whole thing was fluid, and everyone had quite a lot of input, as opposed to one person doing one partic- ular, small task. Everyone had creative ownership." This style of workflow en- abled the group to work quickly. "It is difficult for a large VFX studio to come up with an idea and two hours later have it in the production," says Mason. "But we are a small studio and were able to do that." To create the objects and animations, the group used a combination of Autodesk's Maya, The Foundry's Modo, and Render Legion's Corona. Compositing was done with The Foundry's Nuke. For the liquids and clouds, the artists used "a lot of trickery" with low-reso- lution geometry within Coro- na. "There isn't full-featured volumetrics for Corona yet. We created volumes out of 3D geometry that looked really nice, and then we painted on top of those," says Mason. M A K I N G A N E W W O R L D The environments span the natural, to the futuristic, to the surreal and more. It started with strong concept design, as the designers mapped out the production in a traditional, albeit extensively detailed, way. "The difference was that we were able to make changes eas- ily. "By designing in 3D, you can scatter vegetation and the ter- rain, and see a fast result. That is where we utilized the flexibility of 3D," says Mason. "We started with this mapped-out base and then changed the positioning of objects and reworked some of the landscapes and added new mechanisms and things like that." The designers purchased some tree models and cut them apart and changed them up to make trees, shrubs, and a variety of foliage. Just how many objects are in the backgrounds is difficult to say. "It felt like a hundred mil- lion," says Terni. "We had to deal with a large number of polygons in every scene." Indeed, some shots contained more than a billion polys. The most com- plex scene, Mason points out, contained 30 million unique polygons and two billion to three billion instanced geometry, such as the trees. "The amount and variety of geometry we had in every shot were staggering," Mason notes. Terni agrees: "We tried to push the boundaries of 3D as much as possible. We kept saying, 'Let's do more!'" While the group managed to not break the renderfarm, they did have to do a significant amount of rendering through the Google Cloud Platform. Terni explains that they would use Corona running on local machines overnight, rendering in a low quality to check out progressions, and once satisfied with the results, would send them to the cloud for final rendering. Without question, the key to this project was the assets – as well as the design acumen of the team. Death Wish Coffee 'Storm's a-Brewin' A handful of VFX studios have been challenged of late to pro- duce amazing water simulations for big-budget feature films such as In the Heart of the Sea and The Finest Hours. And as visual effects artists know, gen- erating water simulations is an arduous, time-consuming task. So when The Moving Picture Company (MPC) was tasked with creating a scene involving a practical boat filled with Viking actors getting tossed around on a turbulent CG ocean – for a television commercial, no less – the group knew theirs would be a difficult course. In fact, the spot hardly can be considered ordinary. The 30-second commercial was featured during the Super Bowl, when close to 97 million sets of eyes were glued to television screens. This global appearance was a big deal for Death Wish Coffee Co., a small company that won the Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Big Game contest and earned the prize of a Super Bowl 50 commercial worth approximately $5 million. Death Wish is highly caffein- ated coffee whose packaging includes a skull and crossbones logo – branding that ad agency RPA was easily able to work with. A Viking scenario was con- ceived, as the Northmen battle a stormy, dark sea that cas- cades over a waterfall… where it is revealed that the liquid is actually coffee, as it pours into the mouth of a consumer. With concept in hand, the agency approached MPC New York for the creative. According to Vicky Osborn, effects supervisor on the project, the group had to determine what would be built practically and what would be computer- generated. In the end, the interior of the boat and all the crew were filmed live, as was the coffee drinker at the close; the exterior of the boat and the sails were CG, as were the water and at- mospherics. "Anything in contact with the water and environment was ours, so most of the scene was created in post," she says. The MPC crew used a com- bination of 3D soware to make the spot, including Autodesk's Maya to build, shape, and render the exterior boat and sails, and Side Effects Soware's Hou- dini for the water and effects. Compositing was accomplished in The Foundry's Nuke and Au- todesk's Flame. For tracking, the artists used Science-D-Visions' 3DEqualizer. W A T E R W O R K S The commercial begins with a somewhat calm ocean that quickly turns turbulent against a gray, cloud-filled sky. Using WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/ WATCH?V=IWDKMIMKFP0