You like it? comments, critics, flowers and chocolates all welcomed.
If you want to know a bit more I was asked to give some technical and behind the scenes info for an article in CG website in India. Yes, the commercial is for India, and I have to say that the director and production team were some of the best I had the pleasure of working with so far.
Looks very great to me. I’ve done some of this stuff myself, although by models are usually a lot more cartooney than that. Spent about a week trying to animate a 30 second sequence of a giraffe walking once. Did you model all the movement manually, or did you have some kind of plug in that simulated animal movement?
Curious to know how long it took you, and how well it paid (although I’d understand if you don’t want to put that on here)
I worked on this on a small team, I mean, me and another guy, that small. It took us 6 weeks or so IIRC. Roughly the first week and half doing the modelling, which involved a bit of cheating because I started from another model of an elephant, but that was an African Elephant instead of an Indian one, and also was all sorts of wrong in terms of shape and topology so in the end I think only 20% of the original remained. Then a couple weeks doing the rigging which was a bit more complex than the usual stuff I do since it involved some rather clever (if I may say so myself!) bits, for example, the trunk, ears and tail can be switched between a hand animated system and a physics based simulation allowing me to let the ears flap freely but if they bundled up in a way I didn’t like I could get down and dirty and move them the way I wanted.
The rig also had some degree of sub cutaneous deformation (like a bone moving under the skin), creasing by measuring the position of the limbs and wrinkling up the joints appropriately via a custom script and automated jiggling of the flabby parts of the pachyderm, like the belly or butt.
It sounds complex but… yeah, it is complex; the whole rig setup consist of over 600 elements, bones, muscles, auxiliary elements, controllers, mesh morphs, etc, etc…
While I was toiling away with that my friend was working on the model textures, the footage and extra elements, most importantly the CG trampoline.
For the animation I don’t think I took more than a couple weeks all in all, including the first draft and three revisions. The only difficult part of it was making a good walk cycle that I could use in a few shots, it had to look realistic and “majestic” according to the director requests. The rest was quite easy and fun, making the elephant bounce, spin and flip.
All of it is “hand” animated, except a bit of physics based secondary motions as I mentioned before, but not much in the end.
As for money, I just got my regular salary, if it would had been a freelance job I would have got 3 or 4 times more though and I’ll just leave it at that.
I’ve dug out the giraffe sequence I tried a few years ago. Took me days to get it to this point, and I can still see loads of stuff wrong with it.
Only when you’ve spent a week watching giraffe movies on youtube frame by frame, then meticulously trying to move your virtual knees in the same way, can you fully appreciate how well the elephant moves.
That was great. My nephew is in art school right now and just found out that his 4th year which is all about CGI may be canceled. Where did you get your education/ training?
I am going to send him the link to that, for sure.
Hey, cute is good; that’s the way I like people to see what I do, while technical aspects are interesting it’s akin to a painter having an exhibition and people just commenting on the quality of the paint he used.
I studied on my own, I started fiddling on 3D CG in mid high school and by the time I begun to think that my hobby would make a nice career I was already in a position to attend courses as a teacher rather than a student; which probably says more about the state of 3D art education in my country than about myself…
Hey, practice makes perfect. My first animations weren’t any good, but 8 years later I’m starting to get the hang of it.
Darnit, I keep forgetting to watch this, and I really want to!
I can actually do it at work (don’t ask me why can we access youtube but not newspapers, as the guess I have is Pit-worthy) but it doesn’t seem very appropriate.
Six weeks? If they’d hired me I coulda filmed the same sequence in less then one. Just have to find a company that’ll rent me a trampoline and an elephant
So what are they pitching? It was really good, but I had no idea what the commercial was about…it was for a cement company highlighting the strength of their cement…using a trampoline?
Nice. I liked the walking at the start and end best - the jumping physics were a little off to me (though it’s rare when it’s not). And it was excellent modelling.
My animation sucks, I just can’t get the hang of it. Mind you, I probably don’t use the best software to learn on.
If you see a pink elephant you may want to ask a friend to drive you home.
Actually at the beginning we thought about getting an actual elephant to make some of the shots, but in the end we opted for full CG.
The idea is that the concrete pillars that the trampoline is attached to are very strong.
Not Maya, 3ss Max; there’s a Maya team in the company but they are not really up to jobs like this.
Yes, the jumping physics are not 100% accurate, I had to cheat a bit to get proper framing of the elephant and the poses to fit the timing of the cutting as well as possible. For example the two first bounces (around 25 seconds in) are two fast, but I had to fit two bounces and mid air poses in the time given by the cutting so I had to make it faster than it should be in reality… well, as if you could get an elephant to do it for real anyway.
Did you get an edited spot to work with, or were you able to send some rough animations for timing during the cutting?
It sounds like you were locked in by the timing created by the editor having to imagine an elephant bouncing in the frame and guessing how long to hold the shot.
