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CLIENT : Daimler AG 3D/FX : Realise Studio, London
AGENCY : Jung von Matt DIRECTOR : Zeitguised
PRODUCTION : Rokkit TOOLS : Side Effects Houdini, Nuke, Flame
Realise Studio provided CG content for a micro site project aiming to promote the new Mercedes GLK model of Daimler AG. Side Effects Houdini was our main tool through out the entire project which took more than four months. The final sequences were rendered in Houdini's Mantra renderer, using the new PBR technology.

You can view the "Interactive Music Video" section at:
http://www.mercedes-glk.com
On this first project as a Junior Effects Technical Director at Realise Studio, I was responsible for the models and textures of various street elements and urban furniture. Things like traffic signs, construction equipment, benches, parking meters, vegetation, shop signs etc. I was also responsible for building and managing a Houdini digital asset of the Mercedes GLK car, which involved proxy geometry modeling and Maya to Houdini geometry adaptations. As the project evolved, I took part in the deformation animations and the coloring of those deforming elements. In addition to these, I also worked on a variety of scene setups and took part in the process of building a digital environment around the actual CG city.
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Some of the urban elements that I have modeled and textured.
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I have worked on some trees as well. But they were increasing the render times so eventually we had to take them out of the final city layout. These are results from the test models.
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The car model was provided by another company and it was a very heavy Maya file. I have translated / optimized the geometry to Houdini, meanwhile keeping and organizing the shader groups. A proxy model for display purposes was also created. The rig for the tires was created in collaboration with Kanuka Studio. The shaders were created by Paul Simpson at Realise Studio. Finally, everything was packed in a stand-alone Houdini Digital Asset (OTL) that was easily utilized in any of the scenes. The OTL was integrated into the Realise production pipeline where proprietary tools where used to manage proxies and the actual render archives. "Render Archiving" is based on Houdini's "Delayed Load" technology where heavy geometry data is stored on disk and called at render time to improve network and memory efficiency.
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Some of the object deformations were hand animated and some were created using built-in or custom Houdini deformation tools.