Artifex Creates Carefree Elephant For Nissan

[Josh]

Vancouver-based Artifex Studios has created a photorealistic 3-D elephant for Nissan. The carefree elephant hitching a ride on the back of a Nissan pickup truck was built and animated for Filmmates Productions (Mexico City) and Clemente Camara & Associates in collaboration with The Oranj Group out of New York.

The spot opens on a beautiful field, warm sunlight and an endless winding road. The new Nissan product carries a statuesque elephant. The elephant, moved by the view with the wind in its ears and the fantastic looking vehicle it rides on, slowly lifts up on its hind legs in a human-like gesture that seems to say "I'm the King of the World!"

Although a live elephant was used for parts of the commercial, the realistic movement for the last sequence was completed in full CG utilizing a realistic 3-D elephant modeled after the live action animal.

Since there was a "stand-in" elephant that needed to be painted out prior to moving forward with 3-D, there was a great amount of prep work completed on the plates even before animation took place. First, the plates needed to be tracked in 3-D since both the camera and truck moved throughout each shot.

Camera solutions were exported to both Maya and Nuke. Maya was then used to create projection geometry, which was then exported to Nuke. In Nuke a combination of stills were painted onto the geometry and the exported camera data from the 3-D tracking software was used to create a clean sequence without the stand- in elephant.

The elephant model was achieved by creating a base mesh in Maya. ZBrush was used to create high-resolution detail such as wrinkles and folds. Existing photos were used as reference and color maps were created by painting. With the combination of the color and displacement map, a photoreal elephant was rendered using HDRI photography for lighting and subsurface scattering to help simulate skin. In addition, for the elephant's close-up Maya Fur was utilized for an added touch of realism and detail. Rendering was achieved through Renderman.

Animating the elephant required a balance of realistic motion and pushing the limitations of an elephant's actual range of motion to achieve the client's objective, all the while maintaining a sense of believability.

Go to www.artifexstudios.com to view the spot.

Credits:

Title: VOLAR
Client: Nissan Trucks
Duration: :30
Agency: Clemente Camara & Associates
Production House: Filmmates

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