Peterbilt
3D Logo Design & Animation
An ultimately unused piece for a spot we worked on for Peterbilt earlier this year, that although short lived, was an educational enough exploration to share despite getting cut.
Intended to close out the spot, it wasn't entirely clear what method or style would bookend everything properly. In the last scene of the original edit, we had a large Peterbilt semi rushing towards the viewer's perspective at the climax of action. Needing to find ourselves at the end logo on black, Peterbilt's oval chrome rimmed logo would need to fly off the truck and into position, or appear in some other fashion.
Intended to close out the spot, it wasn't entirely clear what method or style would bookend everything properly. In the last scene of the original edit, we had a large Peterbilt semi rushing towards the viewer's perspective at the climax of action. Needing to find ourselves at the end logo on black, Peterbilt's oval chrome rimmed logo would need to fly off the truck and into position, or appear in some other fashion.
To start, we created our logo from scratch in C4D using Redshift for this project. Utilizing reference to Peterbilt's semi-2D looking logo standard. A mixture of reflective and SS materials at different IORs to kind of give same look. I also needed to create the lettering sweeps from scratch, as well as get bevel geometry up to spec for reflections in render. Reference on left, 3D logo on right.
One of the alternative options I explored was a 3D / non-footage solution with the badge existing in its own world, or a world that blends with the original footage possibly, to give client as many choices as possible. To start, I tested simply coming up on black as we would be ending to begin with.
Straightforward. I then moved on to mocking up said badge on a more realistic location, instead of floating in space, ideally something with chrome that you'd find on the front of semi to begin with.
Motion tests for how this chrome environment would move were awkward, though. A slab of ambiguous chrome didn't really fit well with any camera motion and was hard to place where the badge really was living at all.
A better solution would probably be to slap the badge on an actual truck grill (Peterbilt brand ideally). This helped a lot. Then began process of messing with exactly how much of the truck to even show, as well as HDRI options.
And the possibilities of using a real truck model as an environment were many and promising from initial motion tests.
With this we then went through a lot of motion tracking possibilities of blending the CG truck into real truck footage / maybe just flying the badge off of footage as discussed, etc.
However, the final exploration I was tasked with was a separate standalone logo animation which Peterbilt could tag onto any spot in the future. I believe an old Lexus piece from a long time ago was used as reference, but it was more or less looking to emulate that classic moody, dark lighting product reveal-esque style of 3D animation.
However, the final exploration I was tasked with was a separate standalone logo animation which Peterbilt could tag onto any spot in the future. I believe an old Lexus piece from a long time ago was used as reference, but it was more or less looking to emulate that classic moody, dark lighting product reveal-esque style of 3D animation.
And so we would need lots of different subtle lights all working independently yet together to bring out rim highlights, reflections, flares, etc - starting with the badge. Below shows a few simple passes and then an end result of all light animations together.
And then of course, actually working in the impressive truck rig itself and how it would appear from the darkness into our final badge scene. Below shows a simple breakdown of various light passes at work.
And then final result of all moves and lighting combined.
As mentioned at the start, this was all unfortunately cut due to a change of project scope. Had we continued into finalization (as well as a longer extended deadline), there would've been a lot more shading touch ups I would've done for photorealism's sake and a few other minor things to increase detail quality and flashiness.
Was still a great little project to work on for a week or two.
As always, thanks for looking!
Follow me on Instagram @hunter_kudjo
Was still a great little project to work on for a week or two.
As always, thanks for looking!
Follow me on Instagram @hunter_kudjo
