Happy Finish caught the eye of ad agency Kunde & Co, who contracted the studio to help produce a series of 20+ futuristic 3D environments and product images for Danish brand Grundfos. The campaign's bold and innovative approach centered around showcasing a new range of Grundfos' heating appliances to be used in both domestic and industrial environments.
Credits:
Client: Grundfos
CGI Artists: Simon Nankivell, Matt Painter and Roger Hudson all @ Happy Finish
Software: Modo
Lead CG Artists Matt Painter and Simon Nankivell helmed the CG team responsible for creating the visuals for the campaign all the way from first pre-visualization steps to completion. Using the software MODO the team had a fast and flexible approach to tweek and fine tune the pre-vis of these futuristic environements.
Being involved at the early stages was crucial to achieving the final photo-realistic results that make the campaign really pop, explains Simon Nankivell. “For a project like this, it was really important to create a previs for the images containing photographed models,” he explains. “This meant the distances and angles to shoot from could be worked out beforehand and also meant the models would be integrated realistically into the CG environments.”
On nearly all of the shots the team used MODO during previs, utilising MODO’s speed to play with angles, introduce elements to the scene, and quickly block out areas.
Nankivell recalls how he had to get results fast, especially when much of his early content for the campaign was created face to face with the Danish Art Directors. MODO is a perfect for previs, he notes, and it was particularly useful in this case, given the volume of experimentation requested by the client to figure out what they were looking for.
"The combination of the fully integrated preview render and a good modelling toolset allowed me to quickly try different compositions within the scene with the art directors, which was essential as we only had them for a limited amount of time,” he explains. “I had around eight shots to block out in just under a day. MODO's tool set was very useful, as I was able to rough out quick versions of objects and adjust poses on CG figures, and then run quick preview renders as guidance for the photographers.”
The photographers were given clay renders to help them set up their shots, which in the case of the vast industrial environments, meant that they had crucial 3D reference for which camera angles and perspectives to shoot from. With the exception of a few elements, the entire final scene was created, textured, lit, and rendered in MODO. The pumps were supplied as CAD models, while the city was a purchased asset.
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