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Zspace turns fabric into wine
[Tue 28/10/2008 05:52:25]
In a Deconstruction web-exclusive, Zona Marie Tan talks to Zspace animator Mike Thomson about their recent "water-to-wine-type miracle" made for Rosemount.
Like turning water to wine, the Zspace animators had the task of transforming fabric into wine for Rosemount’s spot at the recent Sydney Fashion Week.
The sleek and sexy 30-sec spot follows a river of computer-generated fabric that gently billows out from a bottle of Rosemount Shiraz to become red wine.
The brief arrived from Badjar Ogilvy in typical storyboard form essentially showing the scene-by-scene play of the fabric movements.
Then the Zspace team of animators Mike Thomson and Jorden Martin sat with in-house creative director Marcelle Lunam to conceive this spot among a flurry of fashion design references ranging from models poses to fabrics.
Lunam, who has a background in fashion design, was the driver behind the spot’s art direction in deciding the colours and exact poses the animators were charged with sculpting the animated fabric into. The workspace became was much like a seamstress’ - full of different cuts of chiffon, silk fabrics for the team to analyse and use for visual reference.
Before embarking on the actual animation, the team cut an animatics presentation using basic Maya tools, then edited on Final Cut Pro, to get a feel of the whole 30-second spot with an inspirational guide track.
“We essentially threw together cubes flying around but in the correct space so we could work out the timing and movements that works with the music, like what the cloth was going to do, how transforming into fluid was going to work as well,” explains lead animator Mike Thomson.
The actual process of creating this seamlessly fabric elegantly waving in the air was the most arduous. Thomson said Maya Unlimited’s nCloth plug-in was key in simulating the realistic movements the spot required.
“Normally nCloth is used to simulate flags, tablecloths and clothes, which is what it was designed for. And typical cloth movements don’t require any art direction because movements are more natural based on human activity, but in this case, art direction was essential to fit the brief.”
The fabric had to be animated in specific sculptural poses in two dress shapes. They were not exactly dresses but were in the design formulations of a dress, akin to capturing a fashion designer’s draping process for ideas.
The most challenging part of the spot that took the longest to complete was the long shot of the cloth flying in.
“The short ones were okay, getting the cloth to fly in to do a single trick, fly a curve, wash across the screen, or pour out of a bottle… those were the simple ones,” muses Thomson. “But when it had to fly in, billow up, snap into a dress shape and then billow up again, and fly out and turn into fluid – those were one of the tougher shots. Those shots took a long while because contained multiple moves in one shot.”
The other demanding sequence was when the dress would fly in and form the base of a dress and all these frilly elements would appear on top of each other. Thomson concedes that that was another complex piece in trying to get the cloth to work layering on top of one another.
“We tried to get to the scientific side of cloth to get it to react to forces and run the simulations, but still be carefully art directed into specific poses, essentially. So the main challenge was blending the whole art and science of cloth simulation, making it move realistically like flowing silk. But still having to wrestle it into these gorgeous shapes.”
And form gorgeous shapes they did, highlighted such by their lighting technical director Jarrod Linton’s task of shading the fabric to almost detailed translucency.
“We had lots of references of different chiffons and silky fabrics,” Thomson says. “We observed how translucent they were and how they react to different colours of light. It was all based on large number of reference of red silks here, trying to find the correct levels of translucency. We had to keep in mind what the environment is going to be that the fabric is in, how evenly lit the whole thing was.”
The wine simulations were produced on RealFlow, with the spot finally mastered on Flint.
As to whether real wine was used in the making of this spot: “We had to open a couple of bottles of Rosemounts to check,” Thomson jokes. “We did take a reference shot of pouring real wine for the end shot of the diamond pour - that was going into specific shapes. We had stock footages of how that would work.”
“But the version that we’re working on now [a Rosemount white wine version], we actually can see the wine pouring out of the bottle so we made some test pours – pouring wine down the sink while filming it to watch how the bubbles form. Only one bottle went down the sink, so it was okay. The rest went into glasses.”
The sleek and sexy 30-sec spot follows a river of computer-generated fabric that gently billows out from a bottle of Rosemount Shiraz to become red wine.
