Our studio produces videos of any complexity. The process of creating one of the most interesting, in my opinion, projects is described below.

In this 15 second video, 3D graphics are used as much as possible. In the process of creating just a 15-second video, we were faced with the development of the environment, character animation and dust simulation.

It all started with a script, it looked something like this:

“An inconspicuous, gray town. People with sad faces and drooping heads. View from above. A multi-colored house appears in the center. Stone, wood, all kinds of paints. All the townspeople freeze in place. They turn towards this house. View from above. Construction dust rises from the center to the outskirts. The city is drowning in its cloud. Work is in full swing. The dust is falling. The city is full of colors. Various textures. Satisfied people leisurely stroll through the streets. View from above. Colorful houses make up the company name.
Slogan: Customer name. The art of decoration.
The video is based only on 3D animation.”

The script is very colorful, but it’s unrealistic to fit it all into 15 seconds, and advertising time costs a lot of money and the limit is only 15 seconds.

First of all, the storyboard and timing were done.

To represent the timing, an approximate animatic was made

After approval, we began creating the street. We needed 2 options: before and after. 2 streets were made in 2 versions, which were carefully criticized and edited:

The work was carried out in 3ds Max, Z-Brush, V-Ray and Photoshop.

After many alterations to the finishing of buildings and streets, the customer approved these options:

In parallel with the development of the streets, work was carried out on character animation. The characters themselves were taken in high quality, these are real people scanned on a 3D scanner.

The animation was redone several times until we were happy with the result. (See video).

The visualization of the scene and characters was done separately, in order to avoid noise in the final version due to Global illumination. For a static scene, GI was calculated separately for the whole scene at once. For humans, GI was counted in every frame.

The last stage is creating dust. It was decided to do the dust in Houdini, because... This is the absolute leader in atmospheric effects and the Mantra renderer does this best.

In the process of creating dust, the script was revised because I wanted to show a lot, but only 15 seconds. The fact that the lion's share of time is spent on dust became obvious to everyone after viewing the intermediate version.

Everyone agreed on the following scenario:

As a result, they abandoned people and dust, leaving only the finishing.

Here's the final version: