New Balance Shoe Animation

Hey guys! It seems I'm getting into a several month pattern of posting around here...

Here's a project we recently wrapped up at Pixel Farm. It's for New Balance's shoe campaign. I was responsible for the modeling, UV layout, and animation. Eric Schulist was responsible for the texturing, lighting, rendering, and compositing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N730KFd3AIc



You can view the full spots on my website. http://joerusso3d.com We were not responsible for the live-action, however.

Enjoy!

Hey Joe,

Great job on this animation. The shoe looks great and the animation is super slick. Could you shed a little insight into how you animated each element. Congrats again!

Cheers,
Erik

nice one ...

I second asking to share the technique of the animation ... looks pretty cool ...

Cool...

I thirded!...

Thanks!

The client provided the sole as a CAD file, which was converted into geometry. From there, I fixed it up a bit and separated the pieces out that would be animated. I used the sole as a starting point to rough of the proportions of the top while also using photographs I took of the actual shoe on 3D planes.

Then I kept refining the top part based on client feedback and referencing the real shoe. While modeling, I had to think about which pieces to separate for animation, and how they would be animated. I was careful with the topology during this, I didn't want to have a mess of vertices to deal with while animating, luckily our textures did a great job of giving us what we needed (it helped we had the actual shoe to scan in.)

For the animation I used a combination of blendshapes and bend deformers for the top pieces, and just normal translation / rotation / scale for the sole. For instance, the main mesh of the top part (the part that's growing that has holes in it) is a few blendshapes keyframed. However, for the side swipe that has the 758 on it, I ended up creating a blendshape for each frame of animation since blending between, say, a few shapes over a course of 10 frames would not interpolate right for that wrapping effect. I thought about it as it's own straight ahead animation and quickly modeled the shape, duplicated, modeled, etc until I had all the shapes I'd thought I'd need. From there, it was just simply keyframing each blendshape on / off, and seeing if the motion looked right. Other parts that did not have a complex shape, had a bend deformer that had translation / angle, etc, keyframed, such as the N.

The animation of the laces was fun. All I did was separate each section of the laces into their own object, and simply scaled that up and having the rest overlap the motion. Then the top part of the laces was rigged using bones and I quickly keyed in rotations / scale. Pretty basic.

While I was animating, the scene was referenced into another scene that was used for texture / lighting / rendering. It worked out surprising well minus a few issues here and there. I used max to model the shoe. Everything else was done in Maya.

Hope that sheds some light on the process, thanks for the inquiries!

-Joe

nice........I like of the look of it all........gook work mate.

Thanks for that Joe. Great job again!