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Heart of Everything

Heart Of Everything, was a little viral teaser i did for Piaget, part of an eyeka competition. The objective was to create brand awareness and to publicize piaget's annual brand ambassador.

You can download the High resolution version at the bottom of this page.

Concept

Total time take for this project was about 16 days. From Concept to Completion.
The Female and male models were taken from e-frontier.com. Music composed by Mark Steven Cook, PRS (50%), Louise Carmen Cook, PRS (50%), Freeplay BMI

I knew The initial concept and idea was the most important aspect of the work, so I didn't rush this part. I took my time researching the company and their work.
Trying to get a feel for their style.I was also careful to make sure I was abel to clearly show the unveiling of the celebrity ambassador. After a few tests and rough renders, i decided to go with mannequins on a red carpet show. I felt that it was the easiest to complete in 2 weeks with good quality and was a good idea to work on.

Here's some of the reference i used. Most if the images were taken either from Flickr, google or deviant art.

Production

The problem with 'working for myself' was that i had the ability to approve my own work. And that's not a good thing, I had to be as subjective with my self as possible, and tried my best to be as detailed and professional as possible with my work.

The great thing about this project was that i had more then enough time to complete it, and I still had the luxury of continuing to refine and redo things that i didn't like, and that really helped me produce a more professional piece.

After the concept stage, it took about 10 days for the production.
All the 3D Work was done in Maya 2009. Some detailing in Zbrush. Rendered on Mentalray and composited With Nuke 6.

Dynamics

There are a few simple visual effects elements as well. I did'nt want the scene to look dead so I added moving things, like the model's skirt blowing in the wind and the falling confetti.

The dress was simulated with Ncloth, in fact only the bottom half is a simulation, which helped save processing time.
The confetti was tricky to do. At first i used a simple particle system, but didn't really get the desirable results. Almost one day before deadline i decided to change to Ncloth and it make the confetti behave much more realistically.
Below's one of the final pre-vis still with the old confetti system.

Lighting

Lighting was the single most important thing for this project in my opinion. I went through many, many changes to get to the type of lighting style i wanted.
The lighting of a scene can either make or break the final piece. The idea was very dependant on the lighting style, which had to look like a celebration or a important red carpet event. Bad lighting is very hard to fix and will always look amateurish. I had to make sure the lighting solution looked real and professional.

I never finalized the lights in Maya. In fact i didn't care much about light intensity or colour, because i wanted to do the final lighting in composite.

Rendering and Composition.

Now comes my favorite part, no not rendering.. Compositing!

It took me about 2 days and 10 hours to render all passes. A total off 11 different passes! I used Nuke 6 and tinderbox plugins to do the compositing.
All six lights was rendered separately so i could controll each light anyway i wanted inside composite. This gave me allot of flexibility, and was much faster to light the scene.

In conclusion

The main thing i learnt was to be as professional as i can and not be LAZY! To be as subjective as possible with my work and not to take shortcuts!

One thing i feel i should have improved was in the color and artistic direction of the piece, which is my weakest strength imo. I did very little plannin for the final 'look', which really caused me unessary time to figure out down the line. something i should be more careful nextime around

Be sure to download the high resolution clip below to enjoy all its half-HD glory!