Mobile Trike Spot

[jstrob]

Here is the spot I was working on involving a lot of PhoenixFD sims. I did alone all the animation, lighting, VFX, fluid sims, rendering, precompositing in 2 weeks. Prior to that I did the motion tracking in Blender with some help from a helper in 2 weeks too and I did the tank rigging prior to production too.

[jstrob]

A test I did for the firing tank FX and rigging:

[Ihno]

Thats very cool. Must have been alot of fun.
Although I find it a little sad an wrong to make wargame commercials for small children.
But that's not your responsibility.
Great Job!

[georgi.zhekov]

Looks great! Good job!

[Neilg]

That's an astonishing amount of work for 2 weeks.... incredible work.

[joconnell]

You've got a great production line going Jocelyn! Have you got a few nodes to render at home or are you using some kind of online farm?

[jstrob]

Thats very cool. Must have been alot of fun.
Although I find it a little sad an wrong to make wargame commercials for small children.
But that's not your responsibility.
Great Job!

Hi Ihno, yes this game is really not for small children I think. Like most video game. So i'm not really sure who they are targeting with this ad. I must say I never played the game myself. I don't have a cell phone. But I just know it's a war game. So I surely don't let my small kids play that game. Even though I spent most of my own childhood playing G-I. Joe. I even brought some of my old G.I Joe toys on the set for reference.

[jstrob]

That's an astonishing amount of work for 2 weeks.... incredible work.

In total it was 4 weeks: 2 weeks for motion tracking and 2 weeks for all the rest. But yes it was too much cause I didn't sleep much and worked mostly 7 days a week.

[jstrob]

You've got a great production line going Jocelyn! Have you got a few nodes to render at home or are you using some kind of online farm?

I don't believe online farm would be compatible with me. I make so many mistakes and tests that it would end up costing too much sending my renders on an online farm. So I use my own render farm consisting of 12 computer: a few workstations, a laptop, and a rack of barebone servers that I assembled myself. It looks like that in my basement:

[joconnell]

I'd be the exact same - I rush too much and make lots of dumb mistakes (thank god for scripted output ) so I don't think I could ever use online farms and make any kind of profit. What type of frame time is your normal limit on your ad work? It's all very well having 30 minute a frame times but when you've 750 frames to do it all adds up

[jstrob]

That's exactly what I try not to go beyond: 30 minutes a frame. But some shots were having 1h30 in average task time and other only 3 minutes. I started rendering the first shot approx 2 weeks before deadline and fed the farm as I progressed until the end. I had some shots taking too much time because of lighting from the PhoenixFd fire being too long to compute so I had to replace that by light pass created from manually animated omni lights. I use a lot of tricks like that to control render time.

[Ihno]

I'd be the exact same - I rush too much and make lots of dumb mistakes (thank god for scripted output ) so I don't think I could ever use online farms and make any kind of profit. What type of frame time is your normal limit on your ad work? It's all very well having 30 minute a frame times but when you've 750 frames to do it all adds up

Nice to hear that even you have those problems.

Dont want to make this a philosophical discussion about war games and children.
But not to be an hypocrit I'd have to say:
As I was about 10 my parents allowed me to watch Jurassic park (which was a milestone in my life and made me become a 3d artist, along with Lord of the Rings later)
They got much more permissive after that, which ended up with me playing Doom and Quake pretty quickly. And I don't think that it damaged my personality.
Its just that... Making war look like a cool thing with childs as target group is kind of sick in my opinion. But again, I don't think thats your responsability.
And it has a looong tradition, I think its a pretty normal thing throughout the whole history of mankind.
Shouldn't be like that, because it can make them throw away their lifes later... But well, it was always like that and the world is still turning.
Its up to the parents to give them the right idea about what war really is.. And thats the best protection one could give because you can't simply isolate them.

Back to topic which camera did you use to shoot the hdri's? Did you corrected them with a color/grey chart?

[jstrob]

I just hope one day war will exists just in games like zombies and other horrors!

I used a Sony A7RII (42 MP). with a superfisheye lens and a nodal tripod head. The only problem is that it's an apsc-lens made for my previous canon digital rebel. So I have to buy a fisheye made for my camera to get the full resolution. But it's still way much more resolution than what's needed for just IBL and reflection. I didn't corrected tham, I just shot in raw and adjusted afterward. Anyway there was not much reflective surfaces in my assets. I also take many pictures of the various light rig and also scanned the couch with agisoft photoscan so I could recreate the set like this:

[waaazoo]

Very nice work Strob. I saw this also on 3DVF

[jstrob]

And here is the set: