When advertising agency, BBH, selected Passion Pictures, a leading UK commercials production house with a pedigree high-quality animation, to create the launch ad for the Audi Q5 SUV, the company chose NUKE to deliver the goods.
“We thought the Q5 ad would be a good way to prove how useful a product NUKE might be to us,” says Passion Picture’s VFX supervisor and NUKE artist Neil Riley. “We’ve always kept an eye on NUKE, and when we asked around Soho which VFX compositor to buy, the answer that kept coming back was NUKE. It has an impressive toolset, handles huge comps really well and, thanks to The Foundry, has much better GUI than before.
“We saw how well it would fit into our CG pipeline, allowing us to import materials from XSI, and make compositing more straightforward. Also, as it is node-based, anyone who has used Shake finds NUKE easy to learn making the talent pool enormous. So we decided to trial it and were so impressed that we bought more licenses to deploy on commercials for other clients.”
The 60-second Audi Q5 ad was produced from Passion Picture’s London Studio, co-directed by Aaron Duffy (1st Ave Machine) and Russell Brooke (Passion Pictures). Titled ‘Unboxed’, it opens on a large cardboard box in the middle of an empty room. An animated character, drawn onto the surface of the box, is engaged in the painstaking construction of a mysterious object. At the end of the spot this is revealed to be a perfectly crafted cardboard Audi Q5 car. It finally transforms into the gleaming real car with the end tag, ‘We’ve unboxed the box’.
“The character was meant to be on the surface, to be part of the box, and this was going to cause us the most problems,” says Riley. “We considered shooting the job stop frame, but realised it had to be created digitally as the animation of the box had to follow the 2D character. We could not animate one without the other – they had to animate together. Doing the job entirely in CG, it would have proven a nightmare in terms of changing the 2D character animation.”
So Riley opted for an XSI-NUKE pipeline, using the FBX interchange format to export models, cameras, UV passes, EXR files and the associated metadata between the two systems.
The project started with a rough CG animatic of the commercial, with hand-drawn 2D references provided by Brooke projected onto a rudimentary CG-animated box created by Duffy. This gave the team insight into how the 2D and CG items would be best blended later in NUKE, and also helped with the pacing and timing of the action. Once perfected, the box was modelled, with appropriate cardboard textures, in XSI, with Brooke’s hand-drawn character animation scanned in.
“The UV passes gave me all of the information I needed to help make the 2D sit properly on top of the CG cardboard box,” explains Riley. “You get a flattened texture that you can paint, warp and stretch using various nodes in NUKE. The UV also tells NUKE how to wrap the animation around the CG model, exactly same as it would in an XSI package. But the great thing with NUKE is that it rips through renders. I could tweak the animation over the UV, render the result for checking, and then go back to make whatever adjustments were needed to make the character animation correspond to the CG box.”
Including the EXR files, that contained separate foreground and background layers, shadows, UV passes, 2D animation and the CG box, Riley reckons he was working with around 25 layers in most scenes, “not overly demanding for NUKE, but easily manageable and, above all, fast.”
A further stage in NUKE involved using ID passes for colour correction. “The ID passes let you create mattes for any object. So I created separate solids for different parts of the cardboard car, such as the roof, windows and the bonnet, and balanced the grading with these in NUKE. You can do this with the EXRs, but we decided to keep the ID passes as a separate pass to keep things quick.”
Passion Pictures now has five NUKE GUI licences, ten render licences and a 100-CPU render farm in house, which Riley says is adequate enough for the bigger jobs that Passion handles, and could be expanded in the future.
Speaking of performance, Riley says, “NUKE steams through comps pretty quickly, and we could render the entire new versions of the commercial in an hour, including tweaks to every shot.”
Since the Audi Q5 job, NUKE has also been used at Passion on a high-profile campaign for the price comparison website www.comparethemarket.com, featuring Aleksandr the Russian meerkat. The campaign was masterminded by London agency VCCP, and directed by Darren Walsh. NUKE was used for a range of colour correction tasks, adjustments of volumetric lighting, as well as camera projections of textures to enhance parts of the CG meerkat’s wardrobe.
With the knowledge gained from these jobs, Riley says Passion Pictures now has a streamlined pipeline between NUKE and XSI, and amongst the NUKE compers.
“There will always be a number of compers on a project. Having all scripts open at the same time, NUKE makes it a lot easier to harmonise scripts. We can quickly copy and paste and make sure they are all the same,” he explains.
He says that working in 3D space, “is a really impressive feature of NUKE . It feels like the 3D compositing has been built from the ground up, rather than being a tack-on. Although we have not imported massive amounts of geometry, we know we can, and it works absolutely fine.”
He is also complimentary about the colour management tools. “They are nice and simple, transparent, understandable and useable – a breath of fresh air in fact. The colour grading toolset is powerful too. I like the fact that NUKE has a ‘float’ architecture. Everything is in float right from the start, and that’s really powerful.
“The Foundry have done a great job in making NUKE more of a commercial and affordable product,” he adds. “I have to say that we have not got into major difficulties at all with NUKE , and it’s extremely stable. When we’ve ever needed support, The Foundry has been excellent.”