Interview with Taylor James
Taylor James unveils the iconic 3D image of a Pegasus created from thousands of tiny computer generated models of the latest mobile phone revealed by global telecom provider; Huawei. The campaign reached customers all over the world at the Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona. Here we will talk to the David Wortley, 3D Technical Lead and R&D Lead on this work.
Q. How did the brief come about?
We were approached to build this beautiful winged horse made up of thousands of one model of mobile phone, for the global telecom solutions company Huawei. The print image is being displayed throughout the world’s largest cellphone event; Mobile World Congress
Q. What was your company responsible for?
We were responsible for the CGI of the print campaign, this involved detailed modelling of the phone from a physical reference, texturing and shading, covering the Pegasus in phones and then lighting, rendering and comping in Photoshop. We produced one image of the Pegasus and 2 product shots of the phone in 8 days.
Q. What 3D software did you use?
We used 3dsmax and Vray for rendering, with Photoshop used for Post Production
Q. What was the most useful piece of software and why? (Please specify what tools or features of the software made it vital to production).
We use 3dsmax as it's very good for this sort of job where we need to adapt and create tools quickly for the job in hand. To get the right flow and placement of the phones of the body and the wings we used a couple of scripts we've developed on previous projects and wrote a small tool to help with the alignment. Even with these there was a fair bit of manual clean up and tidying up and intersecting geometry. Rendering with Vray allowed us not worry about the polygon count.
Q. What was the most impressive technical aspect of the project and how was it achieved using 3D software?
The most impressive part is the sheer number and detail of the phones, using Vray Proxies we were able to render 40million polygons at 8000 pixels high resolution without any hassle. Each phone was highly detailed, even the lens in the camera was modelled which gives just a subtle bit of variation that really helps make it seem real.
The biggest challenge was definitely lighting it, as the surface is so facetted we had to model curved lights and make some clever render passes to allow comp to get a nice rim-lit lighting effect.
More Details about this project can be read here - Link
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