Baccarat Rouge 540 Spec Ad
Jumping into the Houdini - Cinema4D pipeline, this project centers around building, simulating, and utilizing fluid simulations using Houdini. The goal is to use fluid simulations in the most optimized way to elevate a brand and the way it's being advertised. The main challenge was establishing the pipeline and executing the jumps between complex softwares.
Preparing for Simulation
Simulations are generally more time consuming than regular 3D animations. Having this in mind, the preproduction had to be very effective, I had to perfect animation early, and block the shots out completely so that I can work on the simulations in a timely manner.
I processed and textured the model from scratch to add more detail
After finding the perfect simulation, it was time to mesh it, cache it, and export it back to Cinema4D to do lighting. Before going to Cinema4D, I used the opportunity to use a community tool to elevate my piece.
I knew I was going to use a closeup of the bottle for my second shot, and I found a tool created by Sergey Kharitonov. It was important to understand the tool and setup to build it correctly for my scene, and it really made the shot so much better.
Houdini sim RnD
After perfecting the shot animation that has to include water simulation, I jumped straight into simulating. Importing the alembic of the animation form Cinema4D, and setting up the bounding regions led to iterations upon iterations...
Houdini sim RnD
After perfecting the shot animation that has to include water simulation, I jumped straight into simulating. Importing the alembic of the animation form Cinema4D, and setting up the bounding regions led to iterations upon iterations...
This part of the process felt simple in the beginning, because Houdini has a built in fluid tank system, but the real challenge is art directing it and changing values to get the look you want.
There are a lot of controls and little changes affect how the liquid behave, does it feel heavy, does it feel splashy, does it feel elegant or chaotic, all of these "feelings" are achieved by a combination of different parameters
Post Production and Sound Design
After finalizing the renders, it was time to touch it up in post, make the colors pop, and make the sound design. I use DaVinci Resolve for color grading and I get pretty good results with basic knowledge of the color nodes section. I collected stock audio that fit the brand of MFK, and spliced it up in Premiere Pro.
