Navistar - Shift What’s Possible
Client: Flavor (Full credits at Flavor.tv)
Creative Director: Brian McCauley
Executive Producer: Kate Smith
VFX Director and Previs: Rob Churchill
3D Animation: Krzys Pianko, JC Tecklenburg
3D Lighting and Texturing: Thuc Nguyen, Emily Berveiler
2D Animation and Motion Design: JC Tecklenburg
Finishing: Rob Churchill, Alison Bloom, Michael Anderson, Brian Higgins
Color: Brian HigginsAfter doing previsualization in Unreal and shooting footage, I was brought on along with Krzys Pianko as 3D animators to support the Flavor Team. I also designed the end-tag motion.
We were animating in Cinema 4D and handing it off FBXs/Alembics to Flavor/Cutter’s traditional VFX pipeline (which revolves around Maya or 3DSMax) for lighting and rendering.
Krzys Pianko spent most of his initial time breaking down the monster of an engine file into manageable, organized, elements. While I helped a bit, that contribution can’t be overlooked.
We had to coordinate between shots so the engine continued to build on over the course of the spot and so that we didn’t have the same item bolt on again and again.
Pipeline Hurdles
Initially our rigs were built in Cinema 4D with nested fracture objects. We’d build sub assemblies with mograph effectors then use parent fracture objects to bring all the sub assemblies together.
Unfortunately, one of the export formats didn’t respect child fractures, only the top level, and the other format didn’t support textures/materials; necessary for sending to the next team. Ultimately we had to either bake our sub assemblies or separate all elements into the root and bake/hand key the parent mograph animation.
Animation Snapping into Place.
Below are some work-in-progress versions of the shots I have ownership of.