Barritas “Castle” 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.

The castle, due to it’s complex stonework, was simply modeled using a cylinder primitive and then detailed using VRay’s advanced micro triangle displacement features. The strawberry also made use of displacement for it’s texture in combination with clever modeling and bump mapping. The two water shots were simulated using RealFlow 1.33 and although the shots were quick, a very large number of particles were required to get the water to look realistic. This, in turn, resulted in somewhat lengthy simulations, but produced very nice looking fluid. While most of the grass and terrain is comprised of texture maps, closeup shots of the grass are actually individual blades of geometry ‘painted’ on the terrain with the help of Fred Moreau’s Freehand Tools Script for 3dsmax.

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. The fluid dynamics were produced using RealFlow.