Archive notice: This article was originally published on May 21, 2014. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
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Admittedly, the real-life Hypervenom shoe from Nike is not for everyone. Firstly, it’s orange, secondly, it has studs and makes no sense if you’re not playing football. However, the advert with the CG version that Polynoid has created for the Nike shoe should also appeal to non-athletes. Once again, the studio from Germany has achieved great things in the field of animal visualisation.
Polynoid is currently not only busy with projects, but also with attending award ceremonies. The studio’s advert “Nike Hypervenom – Deadly Breed”(vimeo.com/68125501) has been nominated for the animago AWARD in the “Best Advertising Production” category. In addition, the title design of the short film series “Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn” received an Emmy nomination in the “Outstanding Main Title Design” category. Five former students of Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg founded Polynoid, which currently has two locations in Berlin and Stuttgart. Things are going well for the young team both nationally and internationally, as well-known clients such as MTV, Nike and Microsoft like to work with Polynoid on a regular basis.
The core team at Polynoid consists of nine artists, with a further 11 freelancers available for peak project periods. In keeping with its name – polynoids are multi-limbed deep-sea worms – the studio is multi-talented: it is not a pure VFX studio, but also takes on the concept phase as a production studio. It also pitched the commission for the Nike advert itself together with the production company Blacklist from New York.
In the full CG advert, the Hypervenom shoe comes to life in the changing room, extends a scorpion stinger, appears to breathe and pulsate and, in the finale, attacks the viewer with the laces, which have turned into small venomous snakes. In order to achieve a credible impression of the process, organic textured surfaces as well as scorpion and snake movements had to be created for the shoe model. As the turnaround time for the project, which required a lot of flexibility, was very short, the team used freelancers to augment the labour force. We spoke to Polynoid about the challenging Nike project, which might make you look at your shoes on the shelf at home with different eyes – with suspicion.
DP: How did the contact with the Blacklist production studio and Nike as a client come about?
Polynoid: Blacklist has been representing us in the States for several years and we have already produced various projects together, including the “MTV EMA Show Package” and the “Halo 4 Opener”. This also led to the contact with Nike and the chance to pitch for the job.
DP: How long did you work on the project in total?
Polynoid: All in all, we worked on it for about six weeks. Some of the preliminary work was already done during the pitching phase.
DP: What preliminary work did you already have?
Polynoid: We tried to sell as much design-relevant information as possible with our treatment. That worked for the changing room, which we had more or less already finalised. As far as the character design was concerned, we still had to go through a few revisions, but at least we weren’t starting from scratch, we had a solid basis to talk about.
DP: How many revisions were there?
Polynoid: We can’t really say exactly how many, but what was much more critical was how long the decision-making process took – we actually only got the final go-ahead a few days before delivery, which made us a bit nervous.
DP: The advert is only 48 seconds long – but your team was quite large with 19 artists. What was so extremely time-consuming about the project?
Polynoid: We had very little time and knew that we had to remain flexible until the end in order to be able to make changes – to the character design, for example. That’s why we spread the tasks out so that we could work in parallel and not have to postpone anything.
DP: How exactly did the division of tasks within the team work?
Polynoid: The division was such that the assets – the shoe and the creatures – and the set were prepared in parallel, but we also built the rigs at the same time. As soon as the rigs were ready, we went into animation and then swapped the models again if necessary. Basically, everyone has their own speciality or we booked freelancers who we knew were good in their field and could reliably take on the corresponding task. That worked really well.
DP: Did you get a CG model or a real model of the Nike Hypervenom shoe for the film?
Polynoid: We had both a real pair in the studio and a Maya file. However, both only served as a reference, we modelled the shoe from scratch or did a clean-up.
DP: What tools and plug-ins did you work with? Did you have to expand your pipeline?
Polynoid: As always, we produced all the 3D stuff with Softimage, rendered it with Arnold and combed it in Nuke. There wasn’t enough time on this job to optimise our pipeline to any great extent – but the number of assets was also very manageable, which made everything a bit easier.
DP: How did you solve the lighting to achieve the interesting light and shadow conditions?
Polynoid: One of the client’s wishes was a certain amount of creepiness, which was also transferred to the setting. For the lighting, we set everything up exactly as it would be in reality. Arnold is a pretty “honest” renderer and you always get back exactly what you put in. That’s why the premise “changing room narrow window afternoon sun from outside as primary light source” was all we had to do. The shadows then came naturally, more or less.
DP: What are the advantages of Arnold over the standard Softimage renderer Mental Ray?
Polynoid: Compared to Mental Ray, which we used to render with, we appreciate the fact that we can work a lot with displacement without any problems and that the interactivity of the lighting is better with Arnold. Basically, we have the feeling that we can achieve a realistic result faster with Arnold without having to render a lot of passes and put a lot of work into compositing.
DP: Have you tested any other renderer alternatives? What about V-Ray, for example?
Polynoid: We have a very good relationship with Solid Angle, who kindly provided us with a few licences for a non-commercial project with Rebird (vimeo. com/25725253). We were quite happy with the workflow and the good integration into Softimage and started buying licences. However, V-Ray could well become interesting again in the future – both because of the results and the fair pricing policy.
DP: How did you go about creating the impression of the animal movement of the shoe and the organic surface?
Polynoid: Part of the team worked on the transformations quite early on in the production process. Once the design was halfway nailed down, rigs and blendshapes were created and the rest was animation work. For the scorpion stinger, we had a shoe model with some lattice deformers and a simple character rig. For the catches, we simply blended between the original shoe model and the creature version in one frame. The shoelace snakes were first modelled in the creature form and then forced into the harmless shoelace form via blendshapes. Zbrush and Mari were used for the surfaces.
DP: The close-up moment when the shoe seems to breathe and vibrate is impressive. How were you able to achieve this impression?
Polynoid: The effect itself was one of the elements that went through the most iterations in terms of customer changes. In the end, it was really just a simple lattice box with a slight ICE weave.
DP: What challenges did you face?
Polynoid: The hardest part of the shot was not so much the animation itself, which we solved with Softimage’s ICE, but preparing the geometry and textures in a high enough resolution that we could get close enough with the camera. We mainly modelled the details in ZBrush and then continued working with 8K displacement maps, which was enough in this case.
DP: What are your next projects or plans?
Polynoid: We are currently in the process of setting up our own production house so that we can work with other directors and produce in a wider range of styles. We’re really looking forward to the launch, which will definitely happen this year. Apart from that, our goal is and remains to produce more and even more beautiful work.
DP: Unfortunately, it didn’t work out with the Emmy award this year. What effect could an Emmy win have had for Polynoid?
Polynoid: Bringing home the Emmy would have been great for us, of course. But mainly we would have liked it if Germany could have benefited as an animation location. The fact that animated films and VFX can also be produced in Germany at an international level has somehow not really been recognised. Changing that and generating more interest would be very important to us.
DP: What’s the story behind your “Golden Cow”, which is actually a small dog?
Polynoid: “Cow” is our studio pet, a French bulldog, mascot and also a performer. She was in our “Polaroyced” video for “Mouse on Mars” and will soon be in an ident that we have just produced for Fox Sports 1 and will be releasing soon. Cow sleeps all day, but is professional enough to be on top form when she’s in front of the camera.
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