DStv commercial (South Africa)

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Werner
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DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by Werner » 28 Jun 2010, 16:58



Luma Animation and Ogilvy Johannesburg teamed up to create one of the first Stereoscopic 3D Cinema commercials in South Africa for the DStv brand.

Directed by Paul Meyer for Luma, this groundbreaking 65" fully animated commercial was conceptualised by the creatives at Ogilvy Johannesburg: Art Director Chantelle dos Santos, Copywriter Dan Parmenter and Creative Director Jonathan Beggs.

With an extremely tight schedule, it took a huge effort from every team member at Luma, as the animators and compositors pulled out all the stops to bring the project in on time. With up to 15 people working on the job literally every artist on this job put in 150% - and it shows on screen. "We could not have pulled it off without this level of dedication and committment from everyone in the team" - Paul Meyer (Director).

The commercial tells the story of a little girl who visits a balloon artist in a park. The artist becomes increasingly more exasperated and desperate as he tries to impress the little girl, who does not seem at all interested in his dazzling array of balloon creations.

"It was a real privilege for Luma to win this board, it feels more like an animated short film than a TV spot and it looks so good in 3D on the big screen".

Graham Pfuhl, Marketing and Sales Director of DStv is delighted with the ad. "DStv is all about entertainment and 3D depicts that entertainment in a very special way".

The commercial will be flighted in 3D cinemas nationwide throughout June and supported by balloon themed cinema activations.

"One of the those rare experiences and smiles all round. Luma thanks Ogilvy and DStv".

All done in Softimage 2010 SP1.
Well done team!

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Hirazi Blue
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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by Hirazi Blue » 28 Jun 2010, 17:02

In a word: brilliant!!! :-bd
Stay safe, sane & healthy!

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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by Rork » 28 Jun 2010, 19:15

Looks great! Well done to all :ymparty: :ymparty:

But why do projects like this always have (extremely) short schedules?? ;)

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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by Alen » 28 Jun 2010, 21:42

Congrats, this is really great looking and entertaining add. :-bd

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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by sysgrunge » 28 Jun 2010, 22:33

Waooo excellent work is very very impressive. Congratulations.

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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by mirkoj » 30 Jun 2010, 01:26

looks great. big grats to everyone involved.
I have one question if you could help me :)
I'm trying to render out one of the shots over network on multiple computers and every frame that is rendered on other computer has slightly diferent hair position. So when everything is put together there is like a flick in fur.
Didi you use network rendering for this project and if so, did you run into any similar problems with hair?
Thanks and keep up doing great work :)

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Werner
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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by Werner » 30 Jun 2010, 09:53

Thanks guys. We appreciate all the feedback we can get.

A bit of background on this...

This was our first Stereoscopic ad, so a bit of trail and error at first. We had six weeks to finish, and that left us with just over a week for rendering.
It's allot of frames (65") to push out at 1280x960 (have to cut down to broadcast res) and Mental Ray did not play well. Crashes, flickering and more crashes.
We decided to invest in a third party renderer asap. The little bit of Arnold testing we did during the making of the ad, proved to be the right direction, but we could not port everything mid way through. All I can say is that Arnold kicks Ass!

We had the same problem with hair position changes on multiple machines, so we had to render the Left and Right camera on 2 pc's. There were no time to trouble shoot. At worst we had hair stretching into space while still being connected to the head emitter....just for a couple of frames, then popping back to it's normal position. The only way to fix this was deleting the bad rendered frames, and restarting Soft. The second or third time around the hair would render correctly....strange.
I still want to get in contact with Mathaeus, as we used kristinka C to do the hair.

I wish clients would see the benefit of allowing more time on projects like this, but I'm happy with outcome and very proud of my team.

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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by mirkoj » 30 Jun 2010, 10:15

So 1 comp 1 sequence for hair....
I've figured out that will be the case here. Couple guys metnioned that it has something to do with diferent CPUs. I will try to render only on couple comps that have identical CPUs to see if that will work.

Question about Arnold.. it is kind of a myth around here, all the talk not enough informations.
Is Arnold out on the market yet at all, any contact where we can get more informations?
We are dealing with a lot of problems with MRay as well and considering 3rd party renderer.
Right now we are looking into 3delight but Arnold would be great to check out as well.

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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by mirkoj » 30 Jun 2010, 10:50

and rendering over network using only comps with identical CPUs didn't help as well...

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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by crude » 30 Jun 2010, 13:26

so cool, love it :)

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Werner
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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by Werner » 30 Jun 2010, 13:56

Yeah, that is way we used 1 pc per hair shot...it's a massive downfall.

I can't say much about Arnold because of NDA, but it will be loved by many when it comes out.

\

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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by Mathaeus » 30 Jun 2010, 22:03

Werner wrote:T
I still want to get in contact with Mathaeus, as we used kristinka C to do the hair.
Well you are always welcome... :)

Beside this long, sad story about Softimage's extravagant choice about rendering engine, that seems to be finally finished for you... and for me too, in some another way...

Sometimes this summer, I planning to add small update to Kristinka Hair, containing a few fixes. Nothing for problems mentioned there, but for example, I believe I finally have a solution for problem with disappearing strands in rendering, when using 'filler' compounds, and few other problems that people reported.

Great work, guys !

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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by sirdavid32 » 01 Jul 2010, 04:34

So far, you´ve mention the usual:
Crashes, Flickers, Poping here and there, and also the 2 Cam renders.

But how about the composites?
How was this really pulled out to a final stereo video?

how did you get the 3d cam rig? Did you rigged along trial error, did you downloaded anything,
did you buy the anaglyph viewport addon for XSI?

This all looks finely lighted....so how was render with Arnold (in detail) aquired?
1 week? how many machines? Speed?

Thanks.
ps: The girly is sort of scary, doesn´t she blink ever? What about mouth shapes? those were easy to sculpt. How many guys were on this again?

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Werner
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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by Werner » 01 Jul 2010, 10:53

sirdavid32 - We went out and bought a 3d monitor (Zalman ZM- M215W) early during production, but also had access to a 3d cinema in the area.
It took a bit of trail and error, because we built our own cam rig. A slight change in distance between L and R cams makes a huge difference on screen.
We managed to find something that made the client happy, and the rest was then rendered using the same settings. Nothing special and easy to set up..two cameras looking at the same convergence point or interest.

Left Cam Passes were set up, then duplicated to make sure Right cam was the same, and objects were rendered separately to be used in comp. We split everything up into character, trees, extra objects and floor passes. The compositors could then do their magic on the Left cam renders, and duplicate and swap out with Right cam renders right at the end. Small adjustments on masks and effects was necessary but nothing to hectic.

Lighting was basic and we decided not to use Final Gathering or GI purely because of time constrains. It was all done with Mental Ray, but some Arnold testing during the production proved to be very solid and allot (a hell of allot) faster, but changing mid way during production would be to risky, so we decided to stick with MR because lots of character passes were done by this time.

We used about 24 machines that we had to baby sit because of crashes. Render times were anything from 3 minutes to 25 minutes per pass...depending on the complexity of the shot. I still don't know how we finished on time...lots of prayers I guess...and a little flash game called Vector 2 helped to kill time.

About 15 people on the project but no more then 8 at any given time, because we had other projects running as well. The 3 compositors only jumped in over the last week or so.

Funny story about the girl...we created a full face rig for her (Pooby style) and was allot of fun to work with, but the client wanted her to look bored and unimpressed with the balloon guy...nothing we could do to change their mind. The power was there but we could not use it...lol.

hope this answers all your questions, but let us know if you want to know more.

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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by wacom » 01 Jul 2010, 17:56

Great work Werner for such a tight deadline (and putting up with technicalities caused by mr).

I've always admired your ability to model and render well, but I have not been following your work as closely as I used to during the LW days (that seems like eons ago). I know you're being a good team player, and it's respectable, but could you give us insights as to which parts you had the most weight in? I'm gathering it was a lot of hands on deck the whole time, but I'm just wanting to know where your star was shinning the most.

Glad to hear Arnold is shaping up well- very encouraging. I've been finding mr even buggier as of late now that we have the latest "beta". I think if Arnold is reasonably priced (this is a ratio to me though price/performance) then a lot of people are going to ditch mr and use 3Delight and Arnold for 95% of their work. Only time will tell eh?

The lighting was very well done BTW considering the deadline and the lack of even FG. I take it you did use AO though- only makes sense.

Too bad about the pooby rig too! Clients sometimes don't know when they've got a good thing for next to free and get too hung up on an idea and don't look at the "big" picture. Oh well- clients pay!
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Re: DStv commercial (South Africa)

Post by nas » 14 Jul 2010, 12:45

:)) Here's something funny that happened during the project, in the normal case you swear and curse a bit as to what would cause it but it just happened that it looked like her hair was caught in the bench as she walked past. This error actually made me chuckle so I had to save it. Random things like this would happen all the time with the hair, moving forward a frame or back solved it - or a restart.
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