Pioneer Corn 2009

Wednesday, 26. August 2009 16:28

Here’s another spot for Pioneer that was finished early July, and has recently started airing.

I animated the “Standability” section and the final hero shot of the Corn Bin building and transforming into the coffee mug. One of my co-workers figured out a efficient way to change rotation direction on the cubes using mel scripting and custom attributes. All you would need to do is translate it in a direction and it would rotate 90 degrees per grid unit. Without this the project would not have been possible within the deadline, since each cube basically needed to be individually animated.

For example, my workflow for the corn bin was to animate one cube or a row of cubes, copy, paste, offset timing, followed by manual refinement of each cube based on where the camera was. Particles, dynamic sims, etc were just not giving us the result needed, so we went with the most straight forward approach. It was a lot of grunt work, but a good learning experience for pipelining / animation efficiency.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Artists + Animators
Chad Retrum
Eric Schulist
Joe Russo
Pail Wilson
Rich Haesemeyer
Tom Doeden

Compositors
Eric Schulist
Rich Haesemeyer
Tom Doeden

Colorist
Dave Sweet

Category:Professional | Comment (0) | Autor: Joe

New Balance Shoe Animation

Saturday, 27. June 2009 10:14

First Mile

Morning

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

Category:Professional | Comments (1) | Autor: Joe

Clank

Friday, 5. December 2008 0:16

This is a project I worked on with a colleague at Pixel Farm, Eric Schulist. The goal was to demonstrate visual effects integration into a live action plate rather than an in-depth story. It was entered into a local visual effects festival, Minnesota’s Electronic Theater, and shown. I was responsible for the modeling, animation, some simulation, and dust/plasma particle effects.

Category:Animation | Comment (0) | Autor: Joe

Michelin Man Commercials!

Wednesday, 26. November 2008 21:16

Finally! I have dug through the vastness of that which are the servers at Pixel Farm and have uploaded two Michelin Man spots I worked on in August. In the maintenance garage spot I animated Michelin Man in every shot except the tool hand off. In the pump spot I animated Michelin when he walks behind the far gas pump and when he grabs the nozzle. I also built the gas nozzle in 3D and animated its base timing. Enjoy!

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Artists + Animators
Chad Retrum
Joe Russo

Compositors
Eric Schulist
Rich Haesemeyer
Tom Doeden

Colorist
Dave Sweet

Category:Professional | Comment (0) | Autor: Joe