Ford
"Right Here Right Now – Trucks"
Completed September 14, 2009

This is the second of two recently completed :30 second spots produced for Ford Canada, coming out of Hatch Studios. It features 100% digital vehicles and environments.

These spots were very labor intensive due to the extremely tight deadline. We had a window of exactly 6 weeks to complete both spots, essentially allowing 3 weeks per :30 second commercial.

Like Ford “Right Here Right Now – Cars”, this spot also differed from previous Ford commercials in that it features not one, but four different vehicles on-screen at once. This produced serious memory issues since each truck could only be brought down to a minimum of approximately 300,000 polygons. Add to that the visually rich country environment consisting of hundreds of hills, bridges, trees, plants, bushes, etc, and you end up with scenes consisting of more than 2 million polygons. In order to be able to render this, as many objects as possible were instanced in order to take advantage of VRay’s massive memory rendering capabilities for instanced geometry. Not only was every plant variant instanced but so were vehicle sides using mirrored instancing.

The tunnel environment proved to be especially challenging to render due to interior global illumination lighting limitations. In most cases, the work-around was to bake in the GI lighting onto the textures so as to avoid further GI rendering.

All the vehicle shaders were developed from scratch and built physically correct in order to effectively simulate dual-coat and tri-coat glossy body paints.

The lighting system consisted primarily of VRay’s physical sun system in combination with high-resolution HDRI mapping and a mix of irradiance and monte-carlo global illumination rendering, with fully raytraced depth of field and motion blur effects.

This spot was modeled and animated with 3dsmax 2009, rendered using VRay 1.5 SP3, composited with Combustion & After Effects and onlined using an Inferno.

Credits

Directed by Richard Rosenman
Exec. Produced by Randi Yaffa
Produced by Carrie Jeffels
Vehicle Modeling by Rowan Simpson
Vehicle Shaders by Steven Hollman
Environmental Modeling & Texturing by Abdul Ali Mohammud, Raden Slipicevic, Chris Crozier
Animation & Camera Work by Kevin Vriesinga
Lighting, rendering & compositing by Brad Husband, Steven Hollman

Produced at Hatch Studios Ltd.