Jack Daniels - Honey

V-Ray V-Ray Common Gallery
1

Long time since I posted any work here…

This is one done last year (for Movember) for Jack Daniels Tennessee Honey liquor:

The idea was to create the look of those old sort of “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” kind of shots of people with beards or shirts made of live bees (like this). We started with an original vintage shot of Jack Daniel’s himself - and his understandably famous moustache:

Here’s the final produced image:

Turned out to be a pretty complicated project actually…

I found a really good bee model by Massimo Righi on Turbosquid - so that part was easy enough. I rebuilt the materials with Vray and edited the textures myself, but the model was really good. The only problem was the hair on the
bee was done with Hair and Fur. It looked great, but seeing as I need a gazillion bees and wanted to use Forest Pack Pro and VrayProxies, that wasn’t going to work.

What I ended up doing was creating 4-6 variations of the bee by reposing wings and legs of the base model:

And then I took used the Zbrush Fibre system to create geometry hair/fur on the bees:

Those 6 furry bees I then converted, along with all their hair geo, into VrayProxies. However, to aid visualization I also created a really low-res viewport proxy manually (couldn’t get one I liked with the automatic system):

The rest was pretty easy because I was using Forest Pack to distribute. I ended up with 3 or 4 different FPP objects so I could create finer grained control over the bee distribution. I ended up using both the furry and non-furry bees just to add more variety too. Here is the rough proxy shape of the moustache we made, and the FPP object in the viewport:

I actually ended up creating *way* more detail in the bees than I needed for the original project - because the archival image was quite rough and grainy - but we did end up creating a more detailed
version for another part of the project. Here is what the final bees looked like in a test render (with some post - not a raw render):

And here are a few details of the high-res final, once they had been treated in post to blend into the photograph, and the whole thing given some stylizing:

As always, criticism, comments, and questions are most welcomed.

/b

JD_Bees_Final_prime_shot_smaller.jpg
JD_Bees_Final_prime_shot_smaller.jpg942×531 237 KB

2

AWESOME!. That closeup of the bees is sooo coool. Well done!

3

Excellent work Brett! I love the close-up of the bees before the post work, which is also lovely.

If I had one crit it would be that the curl at the ends of his moustache get a little lost under the mass of bees, which is a shame - but that’s being spectacularly anal :slight_smile:

4

Awesome stuff!

5

That detail shot is awesome. Great work!

6

You are right - it was a trade-off for density of bees, but it probably would have been better to thin it out more there. Thanks.

Thanks Pixelcon, Morne, and Chris! Appreciate the feedback.
/b

7

impressively meticulous, as usual.. love and hate the final image, as I must admit that mass of bees crawling on one’s face kind of freaks me out..

8

Great work. The large amount of Bees sends shivers through my body..

9

That closeup of the bottle is brilliant!

10

Thanks Rivoli and Steve
@kosso_olli: the bottle is a retouched photo :slight_smile: Only the bees are CG (although I did create some of the caustics with CG just to save me some time).

/b

11

Very nice work and the idea with the bees is very cool :slight_smile: but I can’t stop thinking, what if the hat was covered with bees not the moustache :slight_smile: ?

12

Are the bees interpenetrating each other? Or was there a kind of collision distance that prevented this?

13

Thank you and Vladislav :slight_smile:

@kosso_olli: there is a collision distance control that is minimizing collision, but there is definitely some penetrating due to the density I needed.

14

Such a cool project ! Grate !