Nike X United cap 2009/2010 edition + Animation

[Hossein Alfideh]

Hi everyone hope you're all doing well.

I'd like to share with you my latest experience in using keyshot and a couple of more softwares like zbrush and Davinci resolve 16 to create this dramatic animation of a concept cap that is based on Manchester united away kit from season (2009-2010).

My love for united as a lifelong football enthusiast has always lured me to exhibit my passion when it comes to personal projects/experiments. Recently I've been practicing zbrush so after learning a couple of stuff I aimed to model something simple but striking when it comes to details. I had the idea to model a cap but not an ordinary one; a united one! After the model was ready I created the materials and a simple lighting setup to settle the base idea. Since the Nike's iconic design for United in 2009-2010 (black and blue) was one of my all time favorites; I chose black denim material and a printed blue layer on top of it.

My main goals during this project was to simulate how  fluorescent lamps blink when they are turned on for the revealing part of the animation. For setting up the scene circular pattern was used and then emissive light with low intensity to create some reflections and not to lit the scene completely. Later a couple of pins were created exactly on the same angle that our fluorescent lights would emit light to increase the overall brightness to keep the scene light. As I mentioned I wanted to see how much I can expect from keyshot itself and not complex materials for the environment. In the subsequent stage for creating a nice background I tried many ideas but in the end a couple of metal plates were imported vertically behind the cap representing a mirror. The tricky part is to keep an eye your light sources when placing the mirror so we can have a nice clean mirror without excessive reflections. It's amazing how a simple noise bump in material graph can result in amazing reflections on the metal paint. It kinda looked like electricity flow in certain areas so I used both alternatives for various scenes. I imported a ground plane with bright specular and set the environment background to black.
Exploring how to create a cool revealing lightning setup and atmosphere that could be used for a lot of subjects was going good. Another goal was to come up with a scenario from the animation that shows where the design is coming from, what the concept is within a few seconds. I wanted it to be more than just showing various angles of the subject. It was important to indicate the passion behind the idea to make an impact on the viewer and also have the advertising feeling too. The new features in animation are definitely a great help! I usually use the environment rotation a lot to move the lighting setup with a turntable and an orbit in the opposite direction but this time I didn't need to create a messy timeline with extra work. camera twist is also a good way to switch the camera angle but it needs to be faded into the other one with a secondary video editor ( I used resolve 16). Keyframing helped to manage subtle movements when the camera moves very easy as well.


In the final stage all of the frames rendered were rendered with interior mode and denoise on and then stitched together in Davinci resolve 16. The lights flickering , bloom effects and audio files are also added on the video.
I'm glad I changed a lot of settings back and forth and didn't post this so I could see the keyshot and renderweekly collab and be able to participate so I added the final logos for the final touch. You can download the video from here or visit the link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHnM-CuHjmc

your thoughts are welcomed as always. hope you like this.

[Josh3D]

This is great, Hossein. Really effective lighting and materials to highlight the product and the color. You mentioned you used Resolve so it could "be faded into the other one".  Have you tried the Camera Switch or Studio Switch Event? Or is it that a fade effect is needed between the switch?

[Hossein Alfideh]

Thank you very much Josh 
Yes the camera switch event is absolutely what I went for initially. The reason I used resolve in the last minute was because I changed the placement of the lamps and other changes in the second scene( I'm referring to image 4 and 7) since I wanted it archive it as a separate file on my computer I save it as another file. To link the two setups I rendered them both and then imported both image sequences in resolve with a little fade between the switch so they blend in together smoothly.