Info about Pixels

As soon as we heard about the idea for this project we knew it was something we’d love to sink our teeth into. After the initial talks with the director and agency we all agreed that it was going to be a very fun but challenging project.

One of the classic problems with a full CG production is that it can be difficult for the client to visualise how things are going to look. With a project like this one that has so many elements and everything needed to transition smoothly from one to the next and on top of that you add some complex FX and camera work it becomes, well.. tricky Oh, and the lighting was going to change throughout the whole spot..

Very early on in the production we came to the conclusion that we wouldn’t be able to finalize the camera until all the FX work was done. We didn’t want to force the FX to have to follow the camera too much because the voxelisation effect was the hero of the film and therefor the camera should be following that. We knew this was going to be a lot of extra work and in the end it did require many iterations of tweak the camera, tweak the effect, tweak the camera to the new effect and retweak the effect to the new camera. In the end it was worth it and we’re very happy and proud of the result!

Houdini was used for most of the FX work and as per usual it was then imported into Maya for lighting and finally rendered in Vray.