CGI 3D Making of: "Soak Elephant In The Room Spot" - by ABF Pictures | TheCGBros
273Check out this insightful making of the "Elephant In The Room" a 60 second TV spot by ABF Pictures for online bathroom retailer Soak.com. The advert, directed by Matt Barraclough, features a girl (played by Brooke Carter) imagining a baby elephant arriving at her home with the family’s new bathroom.
http://www.abfpictures.co.uk
http://www.soak.com
Music
Composed and performed by Tim Follin for ABF Pictures
Director: Matt Barraclough
Animation / Rigging / Compositing: Joe Spademan
Elephant creation / LookDev / Rendering: Jonathan Macdonald
Rendered at RenderNation (http://rendernation.com/)
Work on the baby elephant “Tully” began with the CGI team (Joe Spademan and Jonathan Macdonald) taking a research trip to Chester zoo where the youngest Asian Elephants “Nandita” and “Indali” became the inspiration for Tully in the ad. The pair used reference photos and videos taken at the zoo to get Tully looking right in the ad.
On set they used a 1:1 stand in prop for Tully’s head and captured HDR images with a Ricoh Theta 360 camera in preparation for animation and compositing into the ad.
To create Tully Joe and Jon used a combination of Maya, ZBrush, Mari, Yeti, Substance Painter and After Effects. Tully was sculpted by Jon in ZBrush and textured in Mari with 240 8K texture maps covering 14 UDIMS on the baby elephants body as well as a hair system simulated in Yeti. Tully was then rigged and animated by Joe in Maya before being rendered with Arnold at RenderNation in Liverpool.
They used Yeti for the elephant’s hair as it gave procedural control over through it’s node editor, this saved time on building the groom which was then attached to Tully after the animation was complete in each shot.
The texture maps for Tully were created in Mari and Substance painter using both hand drawn and photo-referenced textures for diffuse, specular, subsurface and displacement maps. Mari’s warp tool was particularly useful in fitting the textures to the elephant model.
Tully was rigged and animated in Maya with custom controllers built specifically for his trunk and tail movement, nHair follicles for ear movement and MEL scripted toe spread animation to help sell the shots as real. His trunk needed to be able to flop, stretch, swing, grab and twist like a real elephant’s trunk so getting this right was key for making Tully believable.
One particular challenge was a shot with Tully squirting water at the girl. They wanted the water splash to be real so she could react naturally. To make this match the CG Tully they 3D printed the end of his trunk from the ZBrush mesh and adapted a water pump which was then motion matched from the footage and replaced by the animated Tully. This meant that they could squirt the water with a genuine reaction from the girl and then composite the shot so it looks like Tully was squirting the water himself.
At the end of the ad we see bathroom and hallway lights getting switched off, so it was important to make sure that the lights in Maya matched the shots that were filmed. They made a digital version of the set to bounce light back onto Tully as it would if he were really there and to catch the shadows and reflections from the elephant, HDR images that were taken on set helped get the reflections correct, which made a subtle but important addition to us being able to get the end result right in the comp.
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