Served By Dishes

The UFO viral was a spare time project done for Locomotion self promotion. In the plot a lazy guy is hanging out on his sofa. He drinks beer and is served by a plate, our unidentified flying object.

Modelling

We created a basic 3D environment and models like the dishes, a cellphone and a few other objects for shadow or lightblocking that were modelled by Marco and Benjamin Juergens.

Shading, Lighting & Rendering

To shade objects Kay, Marco and Benjamin used different Maya and Mental Ray shaders to create the look for the objects. Kay lit the scene with standard Maya lighting tools. For indirect lighting he used GI maps based on HDRI images in addition to spotlights. He rendered multiple layers and passes to be able to tweak the final look in compositing. Kay also did the pre-compositing in Fusion. Final compositing was done by Johannes Mueller in Shake and final grading was done by Oriol Puig Castellano in Flame with the advice of Director Florian Meimberg.

Animation & Effects

Animation of plate and phone were done in Maya by Markus Pchalek. He also created effect layers for dust on the table using Maya's nParticles.

Software Development

Animation was cached using Locomotion's internal geometry caching tool developed by Dirk. This allowed us to parallelize animation and shading/lighting without the need to use references or import scenes to apply changes.