Case Studies
The Cereal Shot (SWAY Studio)
Recent winners of a VES Award for the U2 video “The Saints
are Coming”, SWAY Studio brings us yet another impressive
project: the Cereal Shot. Wayne England, Visual Effects Supervisor
at SWAY Studios explains…
“The client was General Mills, the makers of Cinnamon Toast
Crunch. The idea for the product shot was to show the cereal
(CTC) from the perspective of a piece of cereal falling from
within the box and landing in the bowl while simultaneously
interacting with milk, which was being poured in the bowl.
It needed to appear photo-real.
“Due to the fact there we were dealing with 105 cereal pieces,
we started doing many quick collision detection tests in RealFlow
so that we could establish the cereal pieces falling out of
the box and landing in the bowl in a natural way. This was
done initially by importing cereal objects into RealFlow,
which enabled a very fast interactivity with regards to moving
pieces and making quick adjustments through the testing and
re-testing of the hard body dynamics. We started with a small
number of cereal pieces and gradually included more as the
testing continued. This included working with all the various
parameters associated with the hard body dynamics, objects
and gravity parameters.
“However, since obj format objects do not carry UV maps
in RealFlow (and we wanted the cereal pieces to appear to
get wet when interacting with the milk), we knew we would
need to either precisely replace our cereal simulation start
positions in our 3D application, or write a script to do the
same. That way, we could export the cereal pieces in sd format
and have the UV’s intact once back in RealFlow. The UV’s would
allow an individual ‘wet map’ to be applied to all 105 cereal
pieces. Since our team included some great scripting savvy,
we decided we would try the scripting route and having done
that, we ended up writing a series of scripts throughout the
project.
“Given the quite demanding assignment, we also pushed RealFlow’s
hard body dynamics to some of its limits, but at the end of
the day we got the project done and our client was extremely
pleased with the final result.
“The software we used included RealFlow, 3ds Max, V-Ray,
and Nuke and Flame for compositing.”
To view the Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cereal Shot, please click
here
(482 Kb). Copyright:
Wayne England / SWAY Studio / www.swaystudio.com
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