Ventavis Animations - Behind the Scenes

BRIEF
To bring to life three CG animations, using swirling particle simulations to depict people enjoying various everyday activities including - meeting for coffee, taking a selfie and riding a bicycle - to run as part of an existing digital campaign.
SOLUTION
Collaborating with Seven Stones once again, we combined our in-house Motion Capture capabilities with our CGI Particle Simulation expertise in Houdini.
Starting with a mo-cap shoot, we propped the various scenes and captured multiple takes, with the Seven Stones creative team directing the action. Concurrent video capture from 3 sides enabled agency and client to review the takes to select the ones that were then processed to extract the skeletal performance.
Building upon the particle system already created for the earlier campaign made it a straight forwards job to plug in the new performances to drive our virtual talent and then allow our animators to choose the final camera paths post-shoot, with complete freedom.
New CG clothing, body shapes and hairstyles were added and setup to dynamically react to the bodies and environmental elements such as wind. The cycling sequence was particularly challenging and was the marriage of several motion takes of everything from peddling legs and subtle head and shoulder rotations to meandering turns and leans. All to bring a level of authenticity to the action, beyond what could have been achieved with all out hand animation.
To evolve the campaign the dynamic simulations were developed with ever finer degrees of volumetric description, bringing a greater sense of depth and perspective to engage the audience further in the everyday scenes being portrayed.
As before a series of stills accompanied the animations, all driven from the same systems for consistency and efficiency though each output, was bespoke to the needs of the medium with resolutions from HD to 10,000px.