Antidote Studio brought Bayer's cutting-edge SmartStax Pro RNAi technology to life in this microscopic showcase of 3D plants, particles and worms. Created in Cinema 4D with Redshift, see the full piece below and a breakdown of a few of the scenes I was tasked with creating.
First scene was a satellite cloud zoom composite using a neat extension on Chrome that screen captures extended satellite geometry off of Google Maps + throw in some VDBs. Nothing too crazy so skipping that one and getting straight on into the cooler stuff.
Vertex Light Mapping
One of the first systems I began diving into was a way to have pulses of light represent the clients RNAi technology surging through cornstalks and root systems down towards the enemy - corn rootworms. Rootworms feed on the root systems of corn plants but upon ingesting SmartStax their DNA is rewritten resulting in death. This would also require some DNA strand animations but more on that later.
Progression of vertex testing into final form.
Using X-Particle's Vertex modifier in C4D I was able to add some slight variation for some more detail in light pass, as well as output custom AOVs for post beautification / glows. I would then apply this similar system to other scenes and just drag and drop geometry that needed to be affected with coursing light. The thing IS pretty slow when you start upping mesh quality to get finer detail and noise, so hopefully something Insydium will improve upon.
Root System
The subterranean root system of the corn stalk was a heavy scene really showcasing the nexus of where SmartStax penetrates and begins to work. We would need a soil transition into the ground, veins of roots running alongside the camera and then whipping around to find ourselves in the matrix of hair corn roots pulsing with SmartStax RNAi in a cavernous underbelly.
This time using XP's tree node to shoot out some tracer strands in a root-like fashion for what would later become real mesh geometry. Instinctually in early tests I had roots growing on with the camera move but client later clarified these would be an already established root system, so no need to scale on.
Through a somewhat convoluted process, splines generated by XP trails could be converted to real geometry mesh with vertex data for the light pulse rig. Again, using the Vertex modifier in XP was a slow loading ordeal due to polygons but did work out in the end. Lots and lots of testing light passes.
Throw in some photo scanned rocks, atmospheric fog, lighting and lots of little root fuzz matrices and scene is pretty much finished.
There was one little problem though, two actually...
There was one little problem though, two actually...
If GIF loads correctly above, you can barely see two flash frames of some extreme motion blur that occur a few frames apart. Still on the right shows the weirdness as clearly related to camera movement somehow, despite the camera rig + spline being totally fine. After some troubleshooting, came to learn this was thanks to a textbook definition of gimbal lock as camera swung from 0 -> 360 degrees. Easily enough, Cinema has a little checkbox for this buried in the camera settings so was able to fix it. As for the second problem...
...this issue was a little more mystifying and never fully explained. You can see in certain areas of these images the render "bucket" or square randomly leaves behind this static-y render of the root that looks blown out and fuzzy. This thankfully only happened to this scene in particular, but caused me a lot of grief and testing to figure out why exactly the buckets were behaving this way for seemingly no reason at all.
Material issues seemed to be the first suspect, which after redoing some nodes fixed some of it, but there was always some infuriating artifact left behind curiously in the exact shape of the bucket square from Redshift. What finally worked (and still don't know why) was changing the bucket render pattern from default Spiral to Hilbert / Horizontal mode. Spiral begins the render in the center of the screen and renders outwards, whereas Horizontal and Hilbert begin rendering in different areas of the frame. For whatever reason as long as the render didn't start in center of screen, Redshift could render the frame correctly. Lol, that's all I'll say, lol and lmao.
Material issues seemed to be the first suspect, which after redoing some nodes fixed some of it, but there was always some infuriating artifact left behind curiously in the exact shape of the bucket square from Redshift. What finally worked (and still don't know why) was changing the bucket render pattern from default Spiral to Hilbert / Horizontal mode. Spiral begins the render in the center of the screen and renders outwards, whereas Horizontal and Hilbert begin rendering in different areas of the frame. For whatever reason as long as the render didn't start in center of screen, Redshift could render the frame correctly. Lol, that's all I'll say, lol and lmao.
And so, the final:
RNAi Exploration
This was actually where I started working in the project, later moving on to addressing the root system.
The climax of the SmartStax Pro product is its invasive integration into the RNAi of the corn rootworm pest. The audience would need to see a portion of the SmartStax RNAi join itself to and then destroy the rootworm's helix strand.
The climax of the SmartStax Pro product is its invasive integration into the RNAi of the corn rootworm pest. The audience would need to see a portion of the SmartStax RNAi join itself to and then destroy the rootworm's helix strand.
Some early texturing / environment camera tests:
I went through several explorations of the best way to accomplish this, mainly using XP and testing a few non-XP ways for particle destruction that ultimately turned out to be too heavy with polygons required. XP performs best as always for C4D and this kind of stuff.
Using some advection via Explosia in XP ended up being the most idea way of dissipating the helix.
Followed by getting two XP systems to work together with insertion + Explosia.
In the end I would come back and touch up some final sims for the RNAi scene fairly close to our render deadline, but all the rest of this scene is the magical work of Sky Goodman.
Followed by a very last minute zoom-out rehash of everything the viewer traveled through thus far, but in reverse back out to the corn field.
