In this viral video I was responsible for all the CGI stuff. I did: camera tracking, model modifcation (base mesh was purchased), rigging, animating, texturing, lighting, compositing and post-effects. Boujou, Cinema 4D + After Effects. Shot on RED.
DOP: Andrzej Belina-Brzozowski
Art Direction: Olaf Morelewski
DOP: Andrzej Belina-Brzozowski
Art Direction: Olaf Morelewski
And some more info:
I usually don't do character animations, especially in 3D, but originally, the sloth had to be made from photos, creating some cartoon effect. After some time, it turned out that we need some more realistic character, so I decided to push my boundries and try myself in such a animation project.
Firstly, I''ve started to search for 3D model of sloth because deadline was very tight, so I bought one of them and did some model corrections. Then I did animatic from storyboard, which gave some feeling of animating this animal and some extra time to think about how to animate "for real". We decided that whole piece will imitate amateur phone-camera, so it was working on my side - I did not have to focus on the details, because postproduction effects like out of focus, shakes or poor bitrate will cover weaknesses up pretty easly.
After animatic approval I did fur tests, Cinema4D have great tool for that, I found solution how fur should look like very fast. On the set, I've decided to put away doing HDRI maps of location to get light and environment informations - I found that fur is working the best with standard light emitters in Cinema 4D instead of Global Illumination, so I took only some photos to get an idea of lights position and reaction to objects. Footage was shot on RED in 5K (because we were thinking about cropping the image at postproduction without loosing quality. For speeding up rendertimes I came up with proxy doing fullHD quicktimes 422, and at the end I didn't change proxy to the original 5K footage - it turned out pretty well with cropping and zooming this HD footage - all bluriness was looking very amateur).
Then, I took footage to the Boujou and tracked it without any problems. There was so much static information on the image that I didn't put any trackers on the set - but I did a quick test on place just to be sure - worked perfectly.
Next thing, was to animate animal, and was the worst part for me :). After watching some tutorials I had some knowledge how to set rig properly, how to animate rig and creating goals for the bones which was very useful (IK Expressions). For facial animation I was using Pose Morph tag (same for the wiggle of the branch). After few nights, When animation was pretty close to final, I set up ligts and did final fur corrections and simulate it to cache. I found that one frame is rendering 3-4 minutes (Standard Renderer, PNG 8bit + psd multipass, aa 1x1-2x2, hair renderer aa: medium, all the other settings set to default) which was pretty quick, but for lack of time - I sent project to the renderfarm and get final frames in one hour (FoxRenderfarm thank you!).
When I got final renders, I composed everything in After Effects. There's nothing much here than: masking, rotoscoping, a little matte painting (bottom and top of the branch), color corrections, blur, grain, vignetting, optic compresations, chromatic abberations, crops, wiggles, motion blurs and all the other stuff that every compositon should have. Picture-spoiling is great relaxing thing:). After that, sound studio bringed those frames extra-life.
All in all, project was pretty scary at the begining but I've learned a lot, my whole work took something about 12-13 days. Here are some sneek peeks, hope that somebody will find it useful.
