NESTEA - leon the chameleon
Underpants.tv, Perceptual Engineering and tHoC create four scaley TV commercials
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PERCEPTUAL ENGINEERING got in touch in May 2008 to ask us if we fancied stepping it up a gear by creating Leon, a photoreal, walking, talking chameleon. The brief was to have Leon explain to an audience the difference between a cup of tea gone cold, and the delicious thirst quenching drink by Nestea.
After being awarded the job by SINGLETON, OGILVY AND MATHER in Australia, UNDERPANTS director and flame operator Paul Freeman got to creating concept sketches for Leon. Daffy designed a polygon layout by drawing directly over the sketches, and sent these blueprints to modelling superstar Ulf Lundgren at LOST LINER in Sweden.
Maya plugin ‘The Setup Machine’ was used upfront to generate an animatable rig as early as possible. This meant client and director approvals were based on a walking moving character rather than a static form, giving a better representation of Leon in his final performing state.
The ‘walking approvals’ flagged changes much earlier than would otherwise have happened, like his tail getting in the way of his walking, arms becoming more defined, extra wrinkles around major joints and so forth. Leon’s surface qualities also went through regular approvals and checks, moving towards a more limey and saturated skin rather than the mottled appearance he started with.
For the wrinkles Estela decided to use Maya’s new ‘nucleus’ technology. The setup consisting of two copies of Leon, a rigid skin version, and a floppy skin version glued to the surface of the rigid skin. By painting the strength of ‘glue’ on different parts of Leon’s body, it was possible to have saggy skin for his jowls and shoulders, while the skin on his head would stay tight and fixed. The result was a system that became foolproof through to the end. As animation came in, we could process the ’skin’ to shake naturally.
‘It made difficult areas to rig very easy, as well as offering a spooky-real looking motion, impossible to achieve by hand.’
Early animation tests were done at tHoC, final animation was carried out in New Zealand by Glenn Wilson with some shots done by Carlos Rosas.
Aaron Grove at tHoC was responsible for getting the passes working together, automated, and rendering as fast as possible. He used Maya 2008’s convoluted ‘frame buffering’ system* to enable the calculation of the displacements to happen just once per frame at render time, but would use that calculation to spit out the many passes that went into making the Chameleon look as rich as he does in the final.
No sooner than the frames rendered through our farm via Deadline, they were were being picked up by PERCEPTUAL, who could see the contents of our system externally and could monitor the progress. Lots of allnighters and 8000 frames later, and a lot of manipulation of the passes, Paul delivered four very lovely commercials which have had massive airplay in Australia.
SINGLETON, OGILVY AND MATHER
Creative Director - Gordon Higgins
UNDERPANTS
Director - Paul Freeman
PERCEPTUAL ENGINEERING
Post Producer - Rebekah Hay
Animation - Glenn Wilson & Carlos Rosas
tHoC
CGI Supervisors - Andrew Daffy & Matt Estela
TD - Aaron Grove
LOST LINER
Modelling, UV Mapping, Texturing - Ulf Lundgren
*This convoluted system has now been replaced with a very usable system in Maya 2009.
