Watertight

This commercial introduced a new look for the German O2 market based on design ideas created by Pysop. The commercial takes us into an underwater world. Streams of air-like bubbles are floating around and form abstract, moving lines. The focus always rests on the camera, everything else is affected by depth of field.

Modeling & Texturing

To create the model Marco could used a real Nokia N95 mobile phone. He took several photos as reference for proportions, textures and detail.
All parts were modelled in Maya with a high amount of detail, providing full flexibility choosing nice camera angles.

Shading & Lighting

To copy the look of the real phone Kay create several materials for each element using Maya and Mental Ray shaders. Lighting was done with multiple Maya spotlights and special reflective geometry to create a nice, reflecting environment for the phone. For the bubbles Kay applied separate lighting setup using HDRI enviroments.

FX

The bubbles required a high amount of control to form animated streams. The previous spots were created in Cinema 4D and we had to match those effects. We decided to develop a custom solution with the controls needed to match the look. The bubbles had to float tightly along a path and swirl around it. They also had to grow along the path so each stream extended by scaling up new bubbles. Dirk placed several nurbs curves in the scene used to position the bubble streams. The curves were animated procedurally using another custom Locomotion tool. Making use of the bubble tool's integrated dynamics Dirk let an increasing amount of bubbles rise to fill the whole scene with bubbles and make the streams less dense.

Rendering

Rendering was done with a basic Mental Ray setup, no final gathering or other technique. Kay rendered over 32 Passes for use in compositing. This provided Lee Miller with the flexibility to tweak almost every aspect in compositing to meet the client's demands.

Software Development

Our first idea regarding underwater air bubbles was the usage of Maya's particle system in combination with the curve flow effect. Unfortunately, this method did not provide the amount of control we needed. Dirk started to design an API based node that created a single output mesh filled with polygon bubbles. Using real geometry instead of instances allowed us to deform each bubble individually, which adds a lot of realism because air bubbles are not perfectly spherical. The deformation effect could be intensified based on the velocity of each bubble. A simply algorithm was integrated to maintain the volume of the bubbles with deformations applied.

Bubble placement was defined by using a nurbs curve as input. Bubbles were distributed evenly along the curve, but their position could be randomized. In addition each bubble could be randomly offset from and rotated around the path tangent vector. Other features included scale controls along the path to let the bubbles grow. This whole setup was completely procedural and allowed scrubbing forth and back in Maya timeline which was great for tuning the animation in realtime.

Dynamics were integrated into the tool at a later point. Using a variable percentage value we could detach randomly chosen bubbles from the path and hand them over to an internal, simple dynamics simulation. Thus, we could slowly decrease the density of bubbles on the path by letting an increasing amount lift off and rise.

To have even more control over individual bubbles Dirk added support for expressions. Thus, we were able to hide single bubbles or change their position and dynamic properties. This was helpful to provide absolute control for hero bubbles while still using all features of the bubble tool to maintain the same look.