This is a spot we did for Burger king advertising their promotional stuffed Coca-Cola bears. I was the supervising animator on the shot responsible for modeling, lighting, textures, and animation (as well as overseeing the whole thing). Two other animators did the setup, and particle snow effects respectively.
A lot of people have asked me to explain how I made the shaders here in this section. Well today is your
lucky day! I just made a tutorial with a sample of this shader to download. It's in
part two of the "tricks" section
for my new short film Emelia production diary.
Check it out, lots of fun stuff there!
All of these shots utilize a "fake-fur" shader I developed based on anisotropic specular and deformation mapping. I approached it from a painterly perspective rather than from a scientific one. In other words, instead of asking "what is the physical model of fur?" I asked "what makes this look like fur and how can I get that look too?". It's kind of like how you would draw a photorealistic portrait of someone - you want to emphasize and epitomize the things that make them "look like them" and then paint that, rather than painting every pour in their face and every hair on their head. So I dubbed the approach "painterly shader writing"
 |
"wackel-dackel" This is a cute little spot for a car dealership we did of one of those bouncing-head wiener dogs you see in the back of cars all the time. The announcer asks it all sorts of questions to which it continually nods "yes" up and down, until suddenly, with the last question, it stops and shakes its head "no" and winks at the camera.
Because the car was moving I had to animate the lights going across the dogs face so it wound match the filmed sequence. That's one of those little things you don't even notice if you are watching, but which make the illusion seamless. I did all the 3D stuff and it was then composited (adding reflections and stuff) in our Domino suite.
"Otto - the Disaster Film" This was for a movie where a penguin was one of the supporting actors. They used puppets for most of the shots, but when it needed to walk or jump or swim they turned to a CG solution. Of course real penguins can do all of this too, but they are pretty impossible to train. For instance if you say to a penguin "ok in this shot I want you to come running around the corner, hop over this barricade, pause and shake your head and then walk slowly towards the camera" it will just ignore you and stare at the wall for hours.
MAIN COMMERCIALS SHORTS STUDIO MAKING OF CONTACT
(c) 2005, All Rights Reserved. "Make Links not Copies"
