With the Adidas Run For The Oceans campaign focusing on renewable materials gathered from Parley’s ocean clean-up operation, our task was to create a photorealistic ocean visual. One that could maintain scale accuracy, and easily incorporate a secondary trash simulation. As massive fans of anamorphic display productions, we jumped at the opportunity to work with Innovocean on their new halo displays.

Process

With viewing angle being so fundamental to the success of the effect, our first step was mapping the location. Without access to the final screens, the studio made use of supplied dimensions and location scouts to build accurate stages and vantage points. Once our set and tank was ready for production, we moved to Houdini to research and build a liquid simulation system that could hold up to 25 seconds worth of scrutiny, both from above and below the surface.

Over 100 million particles later, and we were ready to implement a kelp and trash system. Some Redshift shaders and lighting added logic to the technical chaos. Working with assets supplied by Adidas, we rendered a final set of beauty sequences, before remapping them back onto our hero location, and re-capturing a final plate that would be fed into the Innovocean playback pipeline. Simple? Kind of?

Adding debris

With the hero simulation system complete, our secondary debris system needed to be built and implemented. The key requirement was making sure the “clean” and “dirty” sequences were identical, apart from the visual inclusion of a set of pollutants.

After asset prep and deformation, we seed cycled until we achieved a visual balance that worked. Nothing like art directing garbage.

Projection and capture

And finally, re-projection and capture. After composite, we projected our final sequences from our hero viewpoint back onto our topology. That was orthographically recaptured and then fed into the billboard’s media pool and the public’s eyes. With a shape as simple as a box, life was easy, but our secondary location’s 22 meter curved screen took a little more work...

As expected, the project taught us a bunch, and acted as the ground work to building a pipeline we can can use for future outputs.

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