New Balance Shoe Animation

First Mile

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Morning

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Hello! More professional work, and I’m really excited about this one!

For this, I built a new model shoe for New Balance and animate it in the same style as their previous commercials. They sent us the sole in CAD format which was converted in Maya to geometry. I took that into 3ds Max, cleaned it up a bit and separated the pieces out for animation. For the top, I used the CAD sole as my template for rough proportions and photographs / reference of the real shoe they sent us, breaking up all the parts I think would need to be animated.

I had to tweak the top part quite a bit before approval, in which I finalized the UVS and exported back into Maya. From there I used a combination of blendshapes and bend deformers with basic rotation and translation animation of the shoe. As I was animating we referenced my scene so we could texture / light / render simultaneously. It was about a 3 week turnaround, and I gotta say, it went pretty smoothly and had tons of fun!

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Artist + Animator
Joe Russo

3D Texture & Lighting Artist + Compositor
Eric Schulist