STIHL Zero Turn Mower Release
Some interesting 3D insertion and match-moving I worked on for STIHL's new Zero Turn Mower line they will be releasing in 2023. The agency that shot all the action footage needed a digital bird + lots of grass particle FX to supplement their suburban style environment.
Starting with the bird - STIHL had a bird bath shot the mower passed behind, and requested a robin or similar to be situated in the bird bath. I think the reason for this being they couldn't obviously train a real robin to just sit there calmly as a loud mower roared by lol, so CG it is then.
Starting with the bird - STIHL had a bird bath shot the mower passed behind, and requested a robin or similar to be situated in the bird bath. I think the reason for this being they couldn't obviously train a real robin to just sit there calmly as a loud mower roared by lol, so CG it is then.
Due to budget, we purchased a pre-animated robin model from TurboSquid, but had to jump through a few hoops of converting from Maya to C4D. I used Maya a VERY long time ago so jumping back into the subscription modern day version was interesting. Thankfully Maya has a similar motion clip system for repeating / blending / looping keyframes without touching any keyframes, so repeating the drinking and hopping motions of the bird was easy enough (let for some Maya crashes of course).
Alembic conversion of the clipped motion sequence was usually straight forward but there are always some kinks to iron out when it comes to getting two programs to cooperate...
Strange issues with eyes too, but nothing that can't be baked down and exported.
I tested Cinema's default hair system to get some more realistic feathers cloned on, but opted instead for the relatively unused Ornatrix hair plug-in from Ephere Inc. as a quick fix to some performance issues. Pretty neat program that integrates fairly well with C4D, lots of grooming options.
Ran some goofy tests along side everything else just to see what it could do, need a bit more training on my end as some length behavior didn't bend as expected.
I tested Cinema's default hair system to get some more realistic feathers cloned on, but opted instead for the relatively unused Ornatrix hair plug-in from Ephere Inc. as a quick fix to some performance issues. Pretty neat program that integrates fairly well with C4D, lots of grooming options.
Ran some goofy tests along side everything else just to see what it could do, need a bit more training on my end as some length behavior didn't bend as expected.
Fortunately the shot is a fairly wide angle so close up detail was not needed in grooming in this case. Did run into the problem below of hair popping on and off on mesh, ended up being a triangulation issue that was also easily fixed thanks to Ornatrix forums..
Client also wanted some illusion of water in the bird bath but not a complete realistic sim for budgets sake.
And cut into the final spot:
The other half of this spot was the complex grass simulation being cut within the mower deck, created by the sim wizard Sky Goodman. I stepped in towards end of post to add a simple XP sim transition of grass being ejected out of the deck.
Some of Sky's previz work for mower deck:
Some of Sky's previz work for mower deck:
And non-graded final sim + transition out.
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