57 Ocean Miami beach - Penthouse film - DBOX

[Neilg]

This just went public yesterday.

https://vimeo.com/500267609/56655d006f

https://therealdeal.com/sponsored/57...virtual-debut/

Originally started in August with an 8 week timeline, we were hoping to shoot the timelapses the last 2 weeks of September before wrapping it up. Everything other than the last 2 shots was done and then we had the worst run of weather possible - every single evening for 3 straight months, clouds rolled in and totally blocked the sunset. The client wanted to wait, so we kept an eye on it and waited - with a ton of evenings the guys spent on the roof hoping the clouds would break. We finally managed to shoot at the start of December and get the film wrapped up.

Pushed to get as close to final straight in the frame buffer which was fun. Final moves were mostly fixing inconsistencies as best we could and a bit of punch.


Some frames:

[fixeighted]

Very good, as expected, with some great little touches like the abherration, waves, time-lapse clouds, candles - little things that liven up the shots nicely

[Neilg]

Very good, as expected, with some great little touches like the abherration, waves, time-lapse clouds, candles - little things that liven up the shots nicely

Thanks! we had some fun with the details. once we had a basic outline of shots we got the whole team trying to come up with any ideas or suggestions they could possibly think of that would go over as a nice touch, then we worked our way through the list as the rest was being put together.
A few are super hard to notice - the towel in the opening shot is moving in the breeze, and a few drinks have condensation dripping down them too...

[fixeighted]

Hehe, yeah I see them all now; though easy to miss, they're great touches

[dean_dmoo]

Cool! Nice budget as well reading the article .

I did an in-house project for something similar (high end Miami apartment building) just to try something different from our usual work. Inspired by you guys and The Boundary among others. Still need to get round to finishing the animations, this is a nice reference project to view them again critically. Hopefully there will time time in April to get round to it. *Fingers crossed*

The project website is nice as well. Interesting looking at the high res images. Always enjoy that to see if I can find any useful info / techniques and what detail level is in the model/renders. Looking at the image "57 Ocean 02 Unit Terrace.jpg" there's a blockyness to the ocean reflection on the balcony glass on the right. Any idea what caused that?

Is the exterior animation full 3d for the opening shot and from 0:45? With the people jogging and walking on the beach.

[Neilg]

Cool! Nice budget as well reading the article .

I did an in-house project for something similar (high end Miami apartment building) just to try something different from our usual work. Inspired by you guys and The Boundary among others. Still need to get round to finishing the animations, this is a nice reference project to view them again critically. Hopefully there will time time in April to get round to it. *Fingers crossed*

The project website is nice as well. Interesting looking at the high res images. Always enjoy that to see if I can find any useful info / techniques and what detail level is in the model/renders. Looking at the image "57 Ocean 02 Unit Terrace.jpg" there's a blockyness to the ocean reflection on the balcony glass on the right. Any idea what caused that?

Is the exterior animation full 3d for the opening shot and from 0:45? With the people jogging and walking on the beach.

Ha, the budget is slightly over inflated - that includes all of the penthouse still images too. still, it was healthy - and we spent it all.

Did you post the stills of your project, or are you waiting until the animation is done?

I actually didn't realize they'd uploaded some full res images to that dropbox... it could be cleaner. tons of the images are 1200px wide with super heavy jpg compression.
And 02 Unit Terrace... I should have caught that, I wasn't working on it but I supervised it. that'll be the reflection environment loading a low res proxy version, a mistake that would've taken a few clicks to fix. The 02 unit images were turned around in a week, from no design info, never ideal. And those are the ones that are uploaded full res...! painful.

And yeah, the opening shot is full CG - the only bit of footage used is the last 2 shots for the timelapse.

[dean_dmoo]

There are a few on instagram, this one is my favorite ;

https://www.instagram.com/p/CFy_mN7A..._web_copy_link

The beach going into the grasses is really nice in your set. Something that I struggled with tbh.

[squintnic]

love that first big shot! great stuff
almost makes me miss arch vis lol....

we need the casutics from corona in vray though - please can we have them? not sure why dirty slow corona gets them and vray doesnt

[Neilg]

The beach going into the grasses is really nice in your set. Something that I struggled with tbh.

These are great, nice work! Can see the boundary in the exteriors and the DBOX in the interiors, ha.

We struggled with it too - took a LOT of refinement and studying references. I started it, handed it over to someone else, then another person had a crack at tweaking it, then I took it back on to tidy some things up. One of the first files we started building and the last one to be done.

love that first big shot! great stuff
almost makes me miss arch vis lol....

we need the casutics from corona in vray though - please can we have them? not sure why dirty slow corona gets them and vray doesnt

Thanks man!
if you did come back you'd remember that you only get one job a year like this (if that) where the brief is 'I want people watching this to be super impressed' and nothing more. Good client on this one - very supportive and encouraging, happy to see us making the project look good.
I tried doing the caustics as a separate pass in corona on a few of these shots - the stills have vray caustics. it's not much work to convert, but it's fucking slow and impossible to optimize - even after simplifying every other material in the scene so you've only got glass/water left. Let it cook for 90 minutes and it was still unusable.
Vray caustics worked great using the direct visualisation pass with some denoising, but in next the ability to see it through transparent objects is gone which totally fucks that workflow. It was easier and quicker to do caustics in vray 2/3, it's nuts. Was really hoping to find a way to do caustics on most of these shots but had to give up.

[flino2004]

Nice animation... the only thing I don't like is the glass railing. The reflections are very strong and without distortions, as well as unrealistically transparent.

[jackieteh]

Very nice animation, i like the sunset mode

[allison_thiago]

incredible, a reference for all of us

[glorybound]

Pretty stunning work. Kodus to you guys!