Barritas “Casting” consisted of a twenty-second spot for the Marinela company in Mexico. The spot was heavily focused on character work and required three fully modeled, rigged and textured characters – a pineapple, a strawberry, and a pastry bun. We had approximately two and a half months scheduled time to produce two spots from start to finish. About three weeks were assigned to modeling, four weeks for animation, two weeks for lighting and rendering, and the remaining week for compositing. These jobs turned out to be quite fun to work on since we were able to push the character performances as far as we wanted to which resulted in some very funny animation.

For several shots involving camera moves, pre-calculated global illumination irradiance maps provided flicker-free animation sequences. As usual, shots were split up into various layers to expediate rendering, including background pass, foreground pass, character pass, shadow pass, highlight pass, reflection pass, volumetric pass, and sometimes even a GI pass for realistic contact points of the character’s feet on surface planes. The final lighting was a combination of image-based lighting, global illumination lighting, and traditional lighting techniques.

This spot was modeled and animated with 3D Studio MAX, rendered with VRay 1.09 using global illumination techniques, and composited with Combustion.