SHED

IGA - Produit Gratuit

2012-03-05T16:13:00.000-08:00

Hey there,

here we are again with a new IGA spot and some behind the scene material!

As usual, here are our work in progress on the animation side. We start with the 2d storyboard drawn by our artist Benoit Therriault:

Transfered into 3d for the 3d Animatic where we set the timing and make sure the drawing translate well into 3d.

Then the animators get to it and make some awesome animation. This is a work in progress of it toward the end of the production.

And the final animation in all its glory.

Obviously, for this ad we had 2 main characters we had to develop. We started from drawing, and then went through several passes of refinement to make sure the clients/agency liked them. For example, the lady had to seems really kind, not too old, and above all interested in what the IGA employee was offering. As for the guy, a lot of effort was given to give him the proper "red" color for his hair, because it was part of the "clash" between his look and the Santa Claus suit.

Tweaking the cloth shading in our Shading Scene

Finishing the look of the Hair on the Santa Claus Suit

Here's a small screen capture of a layout rendering:

We try as much as possible to rendering everything in single passes to take advantage of all the arnold GI bounce. It leads to rather long rendertime, but we always manage to squeeze it in our timetable.

The hardest part of this spot was obviously the management of all the hair on the Santa Claus suit while that suit was cloth simulated using Syflex. We started doing "technical" render pass to make sure our hair rendered fine. With very low sampling and no "heavy" shader, we could render very fast frame and make sure the hair didn't pop, or went through mesh, or that our displacement was alright, etc. Here's an exemple of an "hair check" pass:

Another tricky thing in this production was the "magical" transformation of Santa Claus. It's always hard to describe the word "magic" with words, since everyone has a different interpretation of it. So we had to go through several test and finally present this to the client. We also use these render to complement our "hair check" and make sure our Geo and hair is still solid further down the pipeline.

And with the compositing to complement the effect:

And for those interested, here's some screen capture of the Compositing step:

And here's a color chart which we use to make sure we stay withing the palette of color throughout all our IGA commercials.

Hope you enjoyed this little Behind the Scene! :)

And just to give proper credit to the team of artist:

Benoit Therriault :: Concept/Storyboard Artist

Pierre-Hughes Dallaire :: Lead Animator

David Marquis :: Animator

David St-Amant :: Animator

Guillaume Pelletier :: Animator

Miquel Campos :: Character TD

Mikhail Semionov :: Character modelling

Isabelle Mainville :: Texture and Shading

Marc Lebuis :: Modelling and Texture

Dominik Kirouac :: Hair and smoke simulation

Luc Girard :: Hair Simulation

Jean-S. Guillemette :: Modelling, Lighting, Comp

Bruno-O. Laflamme :: Shading, Lighting, Lead Comp

Sylvain Lebeau :: VFX Supervisor, Lighting, Comp

IGA - Odeur de Pain

2012-02-22T14:30:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone,

two new IGA ads recently aired on tv and we can finally show them off! We'll start with "Odeur de pain", and for your pleasure, here's our most extensive making of so far:

Animation Department:

Animatic 2d

This is the 2d storyboard that Benoit Therriault, our Concept artist, has drawn for the project. This is the step where the clients get the first view of their ads. This is the key moment to comments the camera angles, the general lenght of each shots and see if the storytelling works. In this case, it took 5 versions of the board, including a radical change for the last shot when we see all the floating characters to get the board to a point where the animators could start working without the fear of starting over completely if the clients changes idea.

Animatic 3d

This is the part where basic 3d scenes are created based on the 2d animatic. In this case, we stayed really really close to the original drawings for the blocking of the animation. Sometimes, some shot changes when done in 3d because of technical reasons, so it's important to straighten those possible problem right away in this step. We also make sure at this step that everyone love the camera work because this is when it's "locked" for the rest of the project.

Animation WIP

This is a Work In Progress of the animation itself. The intention (the emotions/actions they show) of the characters sometimes (read often) needs to change as the project move along. Sometimes the changes are from the clients themselves, but it happens that the animators suggest changes aswell depending on their knowledge of the timing of the shots and their general awesomness.

Near Final Animation

This is the final stage of tweaking. The secondary animation are added in (hair, hand animated cloth, simulated cloth, etc.). In this case, some actions changed to bring the project closer to the vision of the client.

Final Ad:

This is the final delivered project.

Rigging:

Miquel Campos, our character TD, is quite familiar with Gear and come up with fancy custom modules and tools for our animators. For those interested, here's some screen cap of some of them:

Character Development:

"Odeur de Pain" was one of the most challenging of the IGA ads because we had to create ALOT of characters for the final scene where they are all floating around the bakery. From the start we had a solid management solution to maker sure we didn't forget a step somewhere for one of them.

The characters were all shaded and textured in a shading scene
to make sure they were all balanced.

As you an see below, most of the time at this point the characters still don't have their hair setup because those are being built in parallel.

Environment Layout:

Layouts for this project were quite something because they were the biggest, most detailed environment of the whole campaign. In the precedent ads, we usually stayed in a single environment, but this time the camera had to travel through all of the IGA. We reused alot of the environment from the previous projects, but we still had to work on them to make sure they were good looking in other angles.

Our Vegetables and fruits department, reworked for "Odeur de Pain"

The bakery department

The oven needed quite some work because
we had a full frame on it in the last sequence.
We even named it after our 3d project manager!

Early lighting test

Simulation:

For the hair simulation our artists use curves as guide to create the "brushing" of the hair, also knows as hair cut. Once they got the main guides in place, an ice setup create strands which follows those curves. You can see those strands below in the first image. The strands are assigned a color so it's easy to see to which curves they are assigned. Those strands are then simulated to create mouvement.

Hair is then generated from those strands to make sure every space is filled with a hair.

...sometimes our test render aren't so great..

Annotation on render for further tweak on hair settings

We also had to create "smoke" that represented the smell of the bread. It was quite a challenge because it couldn't like smoke (fear that the grocery store would seems to be on fire), and it had to look tasty. Yep. Tasty smoke which isn't smoke. hehe. After several attempt, we ended up with somethings that, we think, fits the description!

Shading/Lighting/Compositing:

By disabling certains element like SSS and subdivision, Arnold's IPR gives us an almost realtime feedback while tweaking lights.

When we have to render the characters in a separate pass, we try to use the background render as reference for lighting or even camera project the background renders on the objects so they bounce colors on the character.

Lighting an exterior was a pleasure in Arnold so we had some fun in 3d instead of using a photo montage/painting. We also have to keep in mind that in a future IGA campaign, we might have to film the store from outside, so we made sure we had that environment done.

We usually try to render characters in the same pass as the background to get the most out of Arnold's GI bounces, but this time it was too much render for the time we had so the characters were rendered separately.

And just to give proper credit to the team of artist:

Benoit Therriault :: Concept/Storyboard Artist
Pierre-Hughes Dallaire :: Lead Animator
David Marquis :: Animator
David St-Amant :: Animator
Guillaume Pelletier :: Animator
Miquel Campos :: Character TD
Mikhail Semionov :: Character modelling
Isabelle Mainville :: Texture and Shading
Marc Lebuis :: Modelling and Texture
Dominik Kirouac :: Hair and smoke simulation
Luc Girard :: Hair Simulation
Jean-S. Guillemette :: Modelling, Lighting, Comp
Bruno-O. Laflamme :: Shading, Lighting, Lead Comp
Sylvain Lebeau :: VFX Supervisor, Lighting, Comp

Saputo - Lait's Go!

2012-02-13T13:44:00.000-08:00

We recently delivered an ad for Lait's Go which you can see right here:

The biggest par of the production was to create a full CGI cow head which would "yell" and show its agressivness, and hence prove it's Lait's Go whorty.

We proceeded to model the cow from reference photo taken on Set.

Final modelling

The first texturing pass was done through camera projection, but clearly it wasn't enough to cover all area of the head we needed to show when it was yelling

Shading Wip with camera projected texture

The texture was then reworked to be good looking in most angles, and the hair was tweaked until it looked like the real one in the spot (with that funky hair placement on the top of the head!)

Hair W.I.P.

Our animators matchmoved the beginning and end of the shot so the CG head would fit the real, and made sure the connection around the neck wouldn't slide on top of the footage.

Anim Cached loaded and ready to render!

We used HDR taken on set to light the cow.

Chrome sphere to test the reflection of the environment

Reflection pass for the highlights

The shaders were also tweaked up until to end to make sure the mouth looked clean (instead of looking disgusting like a real cow mouth...), and the nose was just as wet as the original cow.

Finally the farmer who was holding the cow during the shoot was removed from the footage, and the cow head was composited on top of the body.

Some prints for the studio!

2012-02-10T10:38:00.000-08:00

Hey there,

Benoit Therriault, our amazing concept/storyboard artist have been quite busy this year! Inbetween all those amazing storyboards he did for several of our production ( i.e. http://bit.ly/xdo80z ) he found times and motivation to create some amazing art for the studio. Here's some of them! You can also look at his personal blog: http://bit.ly/AAtECi

A crop of one of the vertical poster in the 3d Department

Those beautiful prints a couple meters from my desk

A music playing unibrow-cyclop!

Captain crow!

One bad-ass racing crow

Sport Chek - Sidney Corsby's skate

2012-02-02T10:50:00.000-08:00

So we've just got the go to make this little project public. You can watch the 'viral style' ad we did for Sport Chek right here:

This project was particularly tricky because we had to create a photorealistic tomato aswell as it's slices that fitted flawlessly the real ones on set which were manipulated by Crosby. The "handheld" style of the camera added some extra difficulty for tracking because of the heavy motion blur and zoom in/zoom out. We ended up using a mix of 3d tracking and 2d tracking/stabilization to make sure the tomato would stick to the wood plate to make it believable when Crosby was hitting it with his skate's blade.

You can view some screenshot of our work scene here:

The footage was camera projected on the layout to offer lighting and reflection data on the virtual tomato

Lighting/shadows being tweaked to fit the plate

W.I.P. of textured and shaded tomato

Pure reflection test to make sure the environment reflected correctly on the props.

Rogers - Bouche Bée

2012-01-20T16:06:00.000-08:00

Latest ad we worked on.

In order to make the effect, we tracked the head of the actors, modelled 3d faces from a serie of photo we took of them. We then camera projected the footage when it was fully matchmoved, and re-animated on top of that to get the low-hanging jaw. Quite a fun project ! Hope you like it!

Share the Joy!

2011-12-22T07:30:00.000-08:00

Share The Joy!

Repandez la joie!

Click the 'Vimeo' button to access the vimeo page and view it in HD!

Merry Christmas everyone!

IGA - NOEL

2011-12-19T10:35:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas everyone, here's some progress and final frames from our latest ad for IGA:

Watch the Full ad here:

http://www.shedmtl.com/en/no_l

You can see the whole storyboard over at Benoit Theriault's blog (our concept artist) : http://benoittherriault.blogspot.com/2011/12/shed-iga-storyboards.html

From the storyboard

And some 3d W.I.P. renders:

Some Final composited frames:

Shading Scene

2011-12-16T16:11:00.000-08:00

So, we've recently been through some pipeline refinement and made quite a few improvements!

We especially worked on the way we setup shaders on our models. Bruno (shading/lighting/comp) built what we call a 'Shading Scene' in which there is a bunch of physically accurate lighting setup. We then import our assets in that scene and make sure our shaders work in all the different lighting condition (Dawn, day, night, indoor, etc.). That way we are sure that no matter where the asset will be used in a production, the shaders won't be flawed by an overcompensation against a too powerful (or too dim) light.

You can view here some environment example we use to test our Shaders:

A dinosaur, how cool is that?

Little glimpse of our latest project. Stay tuned for the full ad in the next few days!

New Team Member! - Mikhail Semionov

2011-12-02T13:03:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone!

Today marks an important day at Shed! Our new team member just arrived from Russia! For a while now, he was our official "off-site" modelling freelancer. He decided to make the move, and Shed was happy to have him right here in Montreal!!

Welcome to Mikhail and his wife Irina!! :)

You can view his last year demoreel here:

Norman Slater Projections

2011-11-25T13:22:00.000-08:00

I'm featured in LeDevoir and in LaPresse right next to Angelina !

ahah

I directed and produced this new projection for the Quartier des Spectacles and le Centre de Design de l'UQAM. It's based on the work of Norman Slater witch you can see inside.

Its at the corner of Sanguinet and Ste-Catherine. Go see it. Wednesday to Sunday.

LotoQuebec Simulation

2011-11-18T14:27:00.000-08:00

Recently we did a few ads for Lotoquebec recently and Dominik, our Simulation expert have been doing some stuff for their signature. Above you can see one of them. And if you're interested, here are some captures of the 2 simulation pass:

And some screen cap for those of you that loves sneak peak of a Ice Tree:

In-house RnD :: Photo-realistic head

2011-11-11T14:50:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone!

Here's a little 'preview' of one of our in-house projects! A few months ago, in between projects, Bruno (shading/lighting/compositing artist), suggested to upgrade our skin shading 'technology'. The project then evolved into actually modelling, shade, light and later rig and animate the head of one of our animator (Guillaume). Bruno went on and took several reference photos of Guillaume (a.k.a. Gus) during a cloudy day.

Starting from Lee Perry-smith amazing head reference (Infinite-Realities) and face scan, Bruno and Dom then team-tagged and modeled Gus, Bruno for the general proportions and Dom for the micro-details. Bruno then went on and painted a new displacement for the face, with lee Perry-Smith scan as a reference.

The eyebrows and eyelashes are included in the modelling process as a geometry, but the beard and "scalp" are going to be done with strands/hair.

Isabelle, our texture artist took all the references photo of Gus and created the texture for the 3d face. We are currently at the shading stage for the face and will keep working on it on our free time until we are satisfied. Obviously, there is still some work until we get to a completely realistic stage, but we're getting there!

Stay tuned for the next steps as we keep working. Expect this face to move in the near future :)
You can view the progress here:

Dell - The Scotts

2011-11-07T12:49:00.000-08:00

We had to deliver the last Dell commercial in a very short amount of time. While there is screen integration in the spot, we also had to preserve the authenticity of the Touch feature according to the actors movements. This commercial was not storyboarded and the director wanted the most latitude as possible to play with the computer, so we had to expect everything.

We prepared the shoot to record the takes with the real computer, showing its real content. It was a bit of a challenge to organise, but then in post-production we had nothing else to do than screen replacement (for color-correction purpose), having the real moves and the screen content live-recorded on set. Here is a quick breakdown of the technique:

PAINTBALL

2011-11-07T11:31:00.000-08:00

Video memories: SHED's paintball game last summer

CAMOUFLAR

2011-11-04T12:50:00.000-07:00

ROCK ON !

We've been working hard this last month on the next Galaxie music video: Camouflar. Honestly, we've been very impressed by the release of the first videoclip of the new album:Piste 1. Working on the second video was a thrill for us.

The video will be released next Tuesday, and presented tomorrow at Coup de Coeur francophone, just before the Galaxie show.

Coming soon on our project page !

Lotoquebec Boomerang - Making Of

2011-10-21T16:48:00.000-07:00

Hey people!

A few weeks ago we finished a spot for Lotoquebec (view it here) with an amazing actor who's throwing and catching boomerangs on the edge of a beautiful cliff near the ocean. Some people asked us what was the pipeline for this production, and well, we're not so good with words, so here is a video! Hope you like it!

Invisible animation!

2011-10-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

And why would we do that?!
Well, on this project (Loto-Québec Boomerangs) I had to recreate in 3D the comedian's motion to add a CG boomerang in his mouth and on his right foot.

I started by matching the hips to get the global movement and then, using a rough but proportioned face and shoe modeling, finalized the head and foot motion. This animation isn't visible in the final result but was essential to create the wanted illusion. :)

LotoQuebec Boomerang - Matchmove from Shed MTL on Vimeo.

SHED PRANK!

2011-09-27T07:42:00.001-07:00

It's now a tradition to prank those going on vacation. JS left for a week, without telling us where, so we tought we should do a little something to one of the most important thing in his life... his coffee cup!

This is what we called the Jello Mug! Didn't work as well as we plan, but still, it's quite impressive!

What a great thing to see on your desk when you come back from a week off!

Yep, JS did think it was a good prank too!

So, who's off next?

SHED Paintball tomorrow!!!!!!

2011-09-16T14:00:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow at 9am (sharp!) SHED will have another paintball battle. Last year's battle sent a couple guys calling it quits for the year...I wont say any names but one person rhymes with Lylvain Sebeau. =)

If its anyt

hing like last year, I'd expect it to be a spectacular combat full of sweat, screams and welts! So i figured i had to train this year and i did so all week.... by watching movies =) Here are movies that will help me succeed for "bloodSHED".

Monday:
"The Matrix"

I was completely moved by the line "Dodge This"

Tuesday:

"300"

After this movie i was really wishing paintball was Wednesday.

Wednesday:

"Lady and the Tramp" and then "Die Hard"

Okay so i have to admit. I lost a little bit of focus earlier in the evening.

Thursday:

BraveHeart

This had me so ready for battle this morning! I came in to work ready to light up anything that moved. So amped, that I actually had to keep the lights on and open the windows in my Lustre suite to remind myself that i'm at a place of work. Not at a Paintball course. Or even Scotland for that matter.
=)

Friday:
"The Terminator"
Let's do this!

V - 2011 Broadcast Redesign

2011-09-08T19:08:00.000-07:00

This was a big summer! Among a lot of 3D and Post-Production projects, we've also pulled out a complete broadcast re-design for the network V.

After Effects was used not only for the motion design, but also to provide scripted packages to the network so they can manage their renders easily:

IGA - BYE BYE 2010 part2

2011-08-15T15:09:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of update lately, we've been quite busy at work!

Here is a few work in progress screencap/renders from Bye Bye 2010:

IGA - BYE BYE 2010

2011-08-05T11:54:00.000-07:00

Just going through some older projects, I've found some interesting work in progress material from our production Bye Bye 2010 for IGA. (You can view the full ad here)

The whole productions will be showcased in a serie of post, so stay tuned! :)

The main message of the ad is that Vegetables and Fruits are fun! So our concept artist, Ben Therriault had to design some Veggies/Fruity characters that would later dance to some original French Canadian music!

Then Ben moved on and made the first versions of the storyboard to prepare for the shoot!

And one of the last step of pre-production was to set up a Mood Board, and again, Ben did an amazing work painting the characters on some frames from the tech scouting!

The many faces of IGA

2011-08-02T15:16:00.000-07:00

So, we've got a few IGA ads under our belt and since all of them take places inside a grocery store we had to populate it with people! Here's a few mugshot of our 'extras'. Please note that these are mostly 'Shade WIP' renders that were saved a few step before being finished.

The pipeline is usually to have a design drawn, and then we start from some of our main characters and modify them (shape modelling, texture, hair, etc.). That way we can reuse the same rigs that already have been done.

IGA - Air Miles - Characters Lighting

2011-07-28T13:47:00.000-07:00

Hi all!

For this show, we tried an image based approach to light the characters in foreground. So we lighted the BG first, created a SkyDome of it by rendering a 360° camera placed where the hero characters are supposed to be, and finally use it as IBL on the foreground. A LOT of light samples were necessary to clean all that SSS flickering. But we passed through! (...well, the farm did)

Results are good, it was nice to test it on real production; but honestly, we returned to the "good old way" for the following shows: four or five well placed lights on each characters... and letting the wonderful Arnold GI makes his magic!

(click here to see the ad)

IGA - ProduitQc - Sunny Farm

2011-07-27T14:08:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone, here's a few progress shots from IGA - Product of Quebec (you can view the ad here). After all the interior rendering we've been doing on the other spots, this very shot was quite a relief and pleasure to work on.

(Look for the cows!)

"It's a wrap!"

2011-07-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

Dominik went on holidays, and so we decided to set up a prank!

We wrapped all his stuff !

But hey, he's back and thought it was quite funny! All is good! :D

And no time to unwrap! He's already at work, regaining the time lost in holidays!

SHED... always "pushing the envelope"

2011-07-21T07:14:00.000-07:00

IGA - Color Chart

2011-07-20T13:41:00.000-07:00

IGA - Produits du Québec - Lighting WIP

2011-07-20T07:40:00.000-07:00

Here is a quick montage of the lighting process, step by step, for the final scene of "IGA - Produits du Québec" (see the full ad here)

IGA - Boucher

2011-07-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

Some work in progress design and renders for IGA - Boucher (which can be viewed <<here>> ). The drawing are from Ben Therriault (you can view his own Blog here: http://benoittherriault.blogspot.com/ )

IGA - Air Miles

2011-07-15T08:48:00.000-07:00

SSS Tests in Arnold

IGA - Vraiment Frais - Props

2011-07-13T14:14:00.000-07:00

Just a few random props we made during the production of IGA - Vraiment frais (click here for the ad )

IGA - Vraiment Frais - Weegman

2011-07-12T13:59:00.000-07:00

Texture and shading look dev on the main character for IGA - Vraiment Frais ( click here to see the ad )

IGA - Vraiment Frais

2011-07-12T13:29:00.000-07:00

Hey all, just a few sneak peek of the production of Vraiment Frais for the on going IGA campaign. ( Click Here for the ad itself )

:: Welcome to SHED's Blog ::

2011-06-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

Weclome to our Blog. We decided to start sharing the fun we have at the studio. We'll soon be posting screen capture and work in progress of our different productions! Enjoy!