Red Bull advert/ Lighting-Rendering

Although it was a 3d project, we wanted the outcome to have 2d visual style. So, when it came to the Lighting and Rendering stage, I had lots of experiments. As far as the lighting is concerned, I used the standard area lights within Maya 2015. But I also had to decide which rendering engine I would use. The problem was that I wanted to avoid to look too CG. 

I firstly tried to use the Mental Ray renderer, but after a few tests, I decided with a different one, which was also a Maya's standard one, Maya Hardware 2.0. The reason for that was that I was able to get a flat 2d representation of my viewport. After setting the render settings to full HD and the anti-aliasing to smooth and multisample with a sample count of 16, I was able to get what I originally wanted. But it wasn't quite there yet, I had also to tweak the lighting to match the rest of the visuals. So, I tried to use the Toon Shader and I finally got it!

Red Bull advert/ Production

The texturing was quite a challenging part of the production, because I had to paint them to match the 2d visuals. I wanted to have a similar style to the Mac 'n' Cheese animation, Colorbleed, so I experimented on different painting techniques and especially with the brush strokes. I was pretty happy with the end result and matched to our initial idea for the project.

Red Bull advert/ Production

Modelling the characters and the assets was a pretty straight-forward process. I kept the polys to a reasonable for the animation count and because we were going for a 2d cartoonish style and not trying to achieve realism, I didn't have to reach extremely high number of polygones.

Red Bull advert/ Pre-production

ZBrush WORK IN PROGRESS

Moving on, and while we're still at the Pre-production of the project, I started some ZBrush sketches to check the proportions of the characters and also research further the concept ideas.

Red Bull advert/ Pre-production

My initial sketches and concepts for the characters of the advert. Our idea for it was to have a window cleaner character that would fall from the top of huge building desperately trying to catch a Red Bull can during his fall, while his "enemy", a seagull, would take the can away from him. And as a result the guy would land to a skip down in the street.

Sketching different head types, we wanted to be a tired from his work character, mid-age, but funny at the same time.

Searching different body types