Subaru "Car Parts" Commercial

[oktawu]

http://timoschaedel.com/index.php?projectpage=1&projectid=40#

I just saw this wonderful ad done by Lafourmi, and noticed Sebastian Kowalski as the 3d lead,

and also Tim Borgmann on the crew, so i figured it had to be a softimage based production.

Congratulations on a beautiful work of art guys, and if any of you could chime in and give us

a few details on the production, it would be great. I'm particularly interested in the rendering/lighting

of it. It's just breathtaking.

kudos people.

--

okto | visual

www.okto.ro

[Olivier Jeannel]

Super super great ad ! Congrats to the team !

[Nic Groot Bluemink]

Wow, that's breathtaking. Awesome work.

[Ciaran Moloney]

Pure awesome.

[Gerbrand Nel]

Most of the time I find my job in advertising pretty depressing. We're the "smoke and mirrors" people who help fool the masses into buying shit they don't need.
But then something like this comes along and it reminds me of a quote by Herbert Marshall McLuhan : "advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century".
I remember again why I do this job everyday.
Awesome work. Thanks to everyone involved for this inspiring piece.
G

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[Marc-Andre Carbonneau]

This is an incredible piece. Very stylized, very structured and it makes you want to go there. The sound work is also very interesting and adds to the understanding of the world.

The lighting and shading is spot on and quite “original” for a car ad. Ok, let’s watch it again!

 

I’m curious to hear about it too if Seb and Tim care to share.

MAC

[Sebastian Kowalski]

thanks.
the whole production was about 8 weeks long, and softimage only. it was a really crazy time. like you can see in the credits we were a rather small team, but the greatest ive worked with so far. so big up to my "geile typen" ;p

it was the first big project with arnold as render, and our new pipeline (in house project, asset and render management).
as the idea was to create worlds consisting out of car parts we were facing a lot of diffuse reflection..there is glossy all over the place.
and instancing. it is incredible how fast arnold chew through all this data. our farm was rendering for 3 weeks non stop without any failed frames. i really doubt we could do that with mental ray

as being a rather small postproduction house (5 artist at all, 2d and 3d) we are used to have a tight 2d/3d workflow. usually we render a shitload of framebuffer to do the shading in nuke. as we've done a bunch of automotive spots in the past, it worked good so far.
with arnold we've finally had the chance to shade and light to a beauty render in 3d, then passing the raw reflection, diffuse data out to the comp department, recreating that beauty render in nuke to go on further. florian developed shaders for that. he is also the ceo of this place, so we value in house development a lot. in fact the pipeline work was an ongoing project during the subaru job.

at the end it was a great feedback for us, to have a bunch of freelancer work here, which besides tim, never worked with arnold nor with our pipeline before, but they all performed so well, under a very tight deadline.

so thanks once again to those being on the team, after all we had a great time.
-sebastian

feel free to ask for some nerdy specifics

[Thomas Volkmann]

Awesome spot!! looks like a lot of fun...

Thomas

[miquel campos]

awesome!! congratulations Sebastian

2011/2/9 Sebastian Kowalski <li...@sekow.com>

[Morten Bartholdy]

Beautiful work Sebastian!

--
Best Regards

Morten Bartholdy
3D/VFX Supervisor

> thanks.
> the whole production was about 8 weeks long, and softimage only. it was
> a really crazy time. like you can see in the credits we were a rather
> small team, but the greatest ive worked with so far. so big up to my
> "geile typen" ;p
>
> it was the first big project with arnold as render, and our new pipeline
> (in house project, asset and render management).
> as the idea was to create worlds consisting out of car parts we were
> facing a lot of diffuse reflection..there is glossy all over the place.
> and instancing. it is incredible how fast arnold chew through all this

> data. our farm was rendering for 3 weeks non stop *without* any failed

>>> www.okto.ro <http://www.okto.ro>
>>
>

[Guillaume Laforge]

Really great work guys !

Softimage with Arnold is just the best tool for this kind of work, as simple as that :).


Guillaume Laforge
Software Developer / Développeur de logiciels
Softimage

Autodesk Canada Co.
10 Duke Street
Montreal, QC, H3C 2L7

Direct 514 954 7195

[Olivier Jeannel]

A part from the fact that it is a real beautiful movie, it is the kind
of movie that shows the potential of XSI and the cleverness of its tools.

[Christopher Tedin]

You should be proud. Proud of the excellent work, and just a little proud that you made the right choice for the animation/rendering packages. Softimage*Arnold=Wow!

[Piotrek Marczak]

Niiiiiiiice! I got 2 questions if you don't mind
alu parts is custom shader or Arnold one?
was image ensharpened in post production?

W dniu 2011-02-09 14:43, Sebastian Kowalski pisze:

[Steven Caron]

i was amazed by the dandelions made of pistons, then again by the ram, then the spark plug trees, the eagle, and then again by the water!

s

[Sebastian Kowalski]

thanks for the great response, we are really stoked about it. i never thought that this spot would pop up that way. well im a bit biased about it, just seeing all that hard work and errors.
the shader is inhouse but based on the standard shader from sitoa. i dont know for sure if the directors cut had been ensharpened in post. but the beauty render looked very crisp and nice. before the compositing department went haywire with it ;)
i agree that arnold and softimage are the best partners, but dont forget that its the artist in front of that tool that brings all that pretty pictures to life.
and the surrounding which brings the best out of him/her. this means a proper positioned pipeline and having a good vibe after all that overtime we pushed.

the combination of ICE and the instancing qualities of arnold gave me goosebumps, we had some serious numbers to crunch but arnold chew threw them like nothing. we had some clouds that had instances of instanced clouds which refered to instances . . . at some point i had over 40 million polygons on screen.
there is literally ICE all over the place. not one shot without it. and not only the traditional pointcloud use, but also deformation, procedural placing of objects, reading weight and vertex maps, shaking cameras, modelling . . .
-sebastian

[Marc-Andre Carbonneau]

Dude, definitely feel free to do a case study with pics and explanations!

 

I’m also pretty interested in your asset management tools and pipeline. How are you setuped? Do you use reference models at all?

What is your favourite part of your new pipeline?

Thanks

MAC

 

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Sebastian Kowalski
Sent: 9 février 2011 16:27
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Subaru "Car Parts" Commercial

 

thanks for the great response, we are really stoked about it. i never thought that this spot would pop up that way. well im a bit biased about it, just seeing all that hard work and errors.

[thePaul]

Hello list,

My name is Florian Bruchhaeuser and I am the ceo/founder/TD of Lafourmi
Postproduction.
Thanks a lot for interest and the great response regarding the Subaru
"Car Parts" Commercial. I will try to give you some insides about our
workflow in addition to the info Sebastian allready gave you.

Key to this project was and is Arnold and the great integration into
XSI. We bought our first 5 licences 4 weeks before starting this project
and another 5 one week into the project. Sebastian, Tim and the other
artists allways complained about the difference between there beauty
render and the first beauty Compositing. Since openEXR we render around
20 passes. After rendering the compositors start setting up there trees
or use a nuke gizmo to combine the stuff. In the days of MR shaders
there was no way to get a 100% match in comp to the beauty render of the
3D Dept. So I asked Marcos from Solidangle about the insides of the
Arnold Standard shader - 10 minutes later I had the source code! We
started taking the standard and wrote every information out to AOVs -
everything - direct diff, indirect diff (with shadow and without) spec,
refl Fresnel, PP, Nf etc.. 20 in total. Then we rebuild the combination
of this information inside the standart shader into a nuke gizmo and
wrote a simple export tool to get the shader setting from xsi to nuke.
Now compositing had to import the AOVs, autoconnect to the gizmo, import
the settings and everything looked like the beauty render in 3D. The
compositors now had the same standard shader interface in the gizmo. We
ended up with 54 AOVs.

In addition to our new laa_suepershade we wrote a shader for simple
ambient env lighting (renderman style SIG 2001 - ILM) called
laa_envSphere and laa_textureSwitch to switch textures and change there
exposure with ice attributes. We also used the Nuke API for the first
time to create some relighting tools to use the Nf, PP and I AOVs for
simple lambert, phong\blinn speculars and rim lighting in nuke.

Regarding the pipeline question of MAC: Everything here is based on Rubi
on Rails. Great to get data in and out of a database without spending
weeks with php and mysql syntax. First of all there is JOB.Bitch in
development for the last 2 years. This is the major tool for artists to
get information about the project there are working on. Shotlists with
thumbnails, tasks, progress etc. This database is also called by our
inhouse opener and saver tools. The artist sees the information through
a web interface or directly in XSI when saving or opening. There is also
a kind of subversion system for saving - so no more finalFinalV66.scn.
All this on a per artist base, so can see and open the last scene
Sebastian was working on etc. Same system used for nuke opener and
saver. So our freelance nuke artist (with own machines) had to connect
to our tools and where able to open and work on shots right away.

New and used since this project is Render.Bitch - also based on ruby on
rails with webinterface etc. Each renderfarm machine runs a client
(python) which communicates with this database. The "renderOnFarm"
command get the information about the project from the JOB database -
shot, renderversion, framerange, resolution - The artist defines if he
want to do the Arnold export on the farm or local (good for not baked
sims) - On submit the command puts the information (xsi scenefile,
package size etc) into the database - Now every free client on the farm
checks for new jobs in the database starts to render and reports
progress to the database. Update in the webinterface is realtime with
the possibility to see error logs, requeue frames, manage pools etc. The
python client was developed by Philipp Oeser and thanks to Arnold and
this system we where able to render 1,98 million files in 8 weeks with
around 50 error frames total on 10 machines!

Again, thanks to all the artists working like crazy on this piece and
thanks to Solidangle for the greatest support ever!!

List, Thanks for the interest and please don't hasitate to ask question.
Sebastian and me just decided to create some more making off material
for you guys - but like allways - that will take some time.

Regards,
Florian

_______________________________________________________________________

Florian Bruchhaeuser
3D-Artist& Technical Director

aim: lafflorian
phone: +49(0)40-4321.677.00
cell: +49(0)172-41.51.544
fax: +49(0)40-4321.677.07
email: flo...@lafourmi.de
www.lafourmi.de

lafourmi postproduction GmbH
Schulterblatt 58 / Haus C
D-20357 Hamburg
Geschaeftsfuehrer: Florian Bruchhaeuser, Sascha Schmidt
Prokuristin: Rebekka Schmidt
Die Gesellschaft ist eingetragen im Handelsregister des
Amtsgerichts Hamburg unter der Nummer HR B 99367
Steuernummer: 46/739/01315

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[Ed]

pure Awesomeness!!

there should be a Twit button right over that video.

[Byron Nash]

You said your company is 5 people, was that the size of the team or did you have more freelancers helping? Just curious on how many hands on deck you had for the duration. Great work!

[andialias]

Hello Lafourmi,
I'm deeply impressed - great job!!!!
thanks for sharing the details too
Andi

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
a n d i a l i a s
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andreas Schulz     Durbusch 42     51503 Rösrath     Germany
Phone 02205 85204     Cell: 0173 2633893 
http://www.andialias.de

[Sebastian Kowalski]

3 inhouse 3d and 2 inhouse 2d artist.
we had 4 3d freelancer, but not the whole time. and additional 2 compositors on the job.
so a team of eleven artists and one additional developer.
-sebastian 

[thePaul]

Hi Byron,
we had 9 people in 3D during crunch time including TD, Lead and Devl.
and 4 People in Comp (3 Nuke, 1 Flame).

Regards,
Florian

[Daniel H]

Florian, Tim, Sebastian and CarParts Team,

First off, I can say that I have a great appreciation for the clever use of ICE, beautiful shading and rendering, artistic skill, and careful detail that went into creating this spot... as do many others. It's simply fantastic work in every aspect! I noticed on YouTube the view count was up to 29,711 and it's being tweeted all over Twitter. It's exciting work like this that continues to confirm Softimage is indeed the high-end choice for artists needing the most expansive outlet in simulation and creativity. Again, fantastic work CarParts team!

-Daniel

[Gabriel Pires]

Really awesome work, and thanks for the insights and information on how it was created! 

-- Gabriel Pires

imagenation3d.org

[Biju Ramachandran]

Amazing – a remarkable feat - cannot stop watching it J

 

Biju

 

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Gabriel Pires
Sent: Friday, February 11, 2011 12:31 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Subaru "Car Parts" Commercial

 

Really awesome work, and thanks for the insights and information on how it was created!