Hi gang. I wanted to give a shout out to the folks who worked
on Nike Evolution, it just posted. Those who weren't
involved, this is a pretty nice story...
A young studio, Royale, got interested in this ICE buzz and
invited a number of us from the list to visit the studio and
work on a commercial. Their designers had been watching cool
stuff on ICE for a while, admiring Tim Borgmanns work and the
tools Eric was writing, and had tried Exocortex's tools for
maya. They decided this was pretty neat and when they got a
chance to reach out, they took it.
The brief was to take what Digital Domain had accomplished
(about a year ago?) with "Biomorph" and introduce a new
product with an effect similar to the Biomorph knitting
sequence... But with a small team, for a very short
produvtion duration and a fraction of the budget.
Oh and three commercials, not 1.
These are the times we live in.
Given this challenge, Royale turned to the ICE community they
had been eyeing... names were passed around and folks talked
to and consulted. In the end I wound up CG sup, leaning
heavily on Ciaran Moloney as lighting lead and Leonard Kotch
as a tool builder. Steven Caron took a short break from
Whiskytree to lend a hand with some pipeline tools and
general expertise, Billy Morrison dove in with me on VFX, and
aside from that we had the help and assistance of Royale's
maya artists and designers. And not a few of you on the list
helped by offering the studio names and advice when contacted.
So the job was greenlit and we started the clock - about
three weeks, from installing Softimage to delivery.
http://youtu.be/932FiLPe4kc
We rented a farm and populated it with 25 Arnold nodes, the
folks at SolidAngle were awesome, plugged everything in and
made the spot. Our principal tool was ICE, specifically a
very cool and robust system Leonard Kotch put many hard hours
in to create which we called "LKFabric" and inspired by the
example Psyop's Jonah Froedman has set earlier, Anto's "knit
the strands," and earlier work Polynoid did with their
"carbon" spot.
Leonard went all the way with LKFabric... it let us manage
some of the complexity of trying to get the major components
of the shoe to weave themselves procedurally, from fibers, to
threads, to cloth. Because the next spot, which we're
wrapping up right now, required us to get in on individual
fibers in extreme macro shots, Leonard built the system in an
abstracted out manner, unsimulated, and supporting motion
blur etc. I would send him pages and pages of feedback and
requests, and he chewed away at it like a trouper. Pretty
outstanding Leonard, I owe you many beers.
Royale has been kind enough to agree to share the system out
to the community, through Leonard, some time after the final
project wraps.
Ciaran, Billy and Steven worked similarly hard and with the
same good cheer we see so often here on the list. This is why
I like Softimage so much, it attracts artists of this calibre
and can do mindset. I should add that emTools, emTopo and
polygonizer were used as well, though largely in the design
phase and for an effect that was later cut (no fault of the
tools lol the idea just didn't gel with the client.) Thanks Eric!
It's very rare for a small studio with literally no staff
using Softimage to get excited over ICE and have the courage
to jump in with it no hold barred, for multiple spots, like
Royale did. I can't express more admiration for their
willingness to try something new and embrace ICE the way they
did for these jobs.
The results may not be earth shattering but the client and
the studio are happy and the other ice-heavy spot is looking
cool too. In a time where we are all concerned with where
Softimage may be headed it was really gratifying having a
maya studio step out of their comfort zone and place all
their chips on Softimage with one of their major clients like
that.
So I wanted to take a minute to share the story and thank the
people on this list who contributed, both those of us who
worked on the project directly and the guys who extended
advice and friendship to the studio willing to take a chance
on softimage like Todd Akita, Rob Chapman, the gang over at
Whiskytree and many others. Thanks guys.
