Head of 3D commercials at leading VFX facility Framestore Diarmid Harrison-Murray explains the process behind this beautiful underwater wonderland for Three Ireland's 'all you can eat everything' plan.
The saying goes 'there's plenty more fish in the sea', and that certainly seems to be the case in this new spot from Framestore. Head of 3D commercials Diarmid Harrison-Murray explains: "We were approached by Boys and Girls agency in Ireland. They had this great concept and script for this fully CG spot. The only catch was the schedule was painfully tight - just three and a half weeks!
"Framestore took on the project as a whole and we directed it in-house. We also produced the character design and concept art and all the CG, compositing and final grade.
Framestore was responsible for the character design, concept art, all the CG, compositing and final grade
"All the texturing work was done in Mari. The character modelling, rigging and animation was completed in Maya and the environment modelling, look development, lighting and rendering were all done in Houdini. For rendering we used Mantra, and the compositing was done in Nuke.
"All the software we used was useful, but Houdini was vital in terms of achieving the end look I was after. I wanted a stylised look while still maintaining a relatively real quality to the lighting and atmosphere - and we were really able to push Mantra (Houdini’s renderer) to meet these goals. We had a lot of subsurface rendering - both on the characters and the coral - volumetric lighting, and rendered depth of field. I was really happy with the end look and our render times were pretty reasonable."
This article originally appeared in 3D World issue 174.
