And this is... Pete's Can!

                             Chapter one: Prepare to scroll through a longread

  Since 2013 when I've taken a first peek at the CG as a hobby - many projects had taken me over at many stages - mostly due to the frustration of being unable to make many features work together, stability issues and plain old bugs plaguing seemingly straightforward workflows, and most oftenly - inability to fit my appetites into my electronic brain machine capabilitæs.

  However, this offspring of obscure ideas was an impressive outlier - the exception to prove the theorem, a project taken over the top from top to bottom - in order for it to come together against all the odds.

  It all started in 2018 when Peter F (with whom we've been doing a music clip back then) came to me one day - bearing a gift.

  That gift was a can of BEPIS - followed with words: I've found the album art.

  The most straightforward image of what I had in my head after crystallising the idea with the maestro you could already see - way up there in this item's header - with a peculiar annotation.

  But anyway, during next hours web was tortured for all of the Pepsi can design iterations ever made - limited, holiday, national - you name it.

  The search for a reference put up a quirky challenge - finding a trustworthy highres evidence of a can top's existence taken at an even angle was virtually impossible - untill I've come across a perfect referece at some manufacturer's website.

  Further work went surprisingly quick - there was some 3ds Max with a pedantically tuned solid of revolution (I just love how it sounds - like a social solid state booster, but dow there, you know... yet, I dighress!), that had it's top hollowed out and patched with a handcrafted piece made out of a plane with all the details there and a matching number of sides.

                                                            Chapter two: It's all OCD

  I was not about to get jealous with my polygons and gave the can... Well, all of them!

In part due to the fact that the composition was never established by Peter untill the very end - so the whole can was meant to be ready-to-go for the closeups from any angle there might ever be.

  Then we went nuts with the 3D Coat (gods bless the developer of this awesome piece of software and help him keep it safe through this damn war!) making the print for the product. It was quite straightforward.

  The most interesting part was recreating Pepsi paint material as it was exibiting quite funny reflective characteristics being flaky and reflective straight on and more of a matt blue finish under a thin dark clear coat parallel to the viewing angle.

  Here I have to give out special thanks to Grant Warwick, you, OCD paladin, for giving me overall ideas on how to pull such a tricky shader off.

  Also, Grant, thank you for my years of making absurdely overcomplicated mats! You got me there.

  Then the angel of the creative research and OCD (obsesive-compulsive development) turned it's ugly head on me and said: WE MUST MAKE IT SWEAT!

  As I've had quite a lot of VFX experiments that had never made it to the public (for apparently being not good enough, thanks, OCD), I've just set up a PFlow sym, and with a couple of touches and it worked... just fine.

  However, with all the textures being as balls to the wall as the geometry was (8k-s 256Mbs each) and a huge multilayer shader with loads of them, a weight of the particle system, a huge environment HDR, etc... After only some basic meshing in Frost my ram started slowly but surely dwindling on me. 

  So I got it to a level of questionable acceptability, gave my OCD a free STFU ticket - and there it was.

                                            Chapter III: Pete and his demise

  The closer was the final render - the fishier Peter had gotten. Literally. As was all of his album filled with obscure symbolysm - so he wanted the album art to be.

 

  So we've taken a perfectly good and ready to render can and set up some of the worst decorations my hand ever produced - a luminescent fish scales backdrop with some atmospheric effect to make it more prominent and an underlay with some literal high school floor photo.

  At this stage the scene completely tanked my RAM, frequently attended the SWAP and was fascinatingly slow to render. By all means - the project was getting out of hands and doomed to be abandoned right before the completion.

  But it survived. Actually, twice.

  The reality's brilliant irony was the fact that a bulk of this project being a can in a nutshell... Found itself canned - before it's birth.

Together with the album my fellow sound designer mastered for Pete and the clip that I might tell you about here some day.

  The creative reserach backfired on Peter, and he put a veto on all of our products deeming them obsolete on arrival - and disappeared in search of his true self. Still, there he is - I met him past summer, as he was plunging on his way there flexing his mind and muscles as his mastermind Mike Gira told us.

 

  The materials, however, were eventually published in 2020, and so I leave you with the final state of the art - with all the creative research stains on it, as it is.

Take care and have a good one. Thanks for your attention. Never trust your OCD.

 Cheers.