Naturepedic Mattress Commercial

[DMerz III]

This is stunning work! Great effort from your team

[sloanelliot]

Okay, this is nutty! So good. Can I ask how long this project took from start to finish? Seems like some tricky workflow, but you really pulled it off. And as far as materials go, did you use any scanned textures or were they all created in KeyShot or somewhere else?

Great job!

Haha thanks, man! Really means a lot..

I'm not sure I could even say for sure on time because the client took well over a month each time we submitted anything for feedback (total radio silence), not to mention their internal Creative Director quit/relocated about a month after we signed on to do the project haha.. It was a mess. I bid 60sec and the final ended up exactly double that (the above version is our 60sec "fun" edit), but a lot of scope creep w/the owners making creative decisions. If I had to break it down into dedicated time, modeling took maybe ~2 weeks for all three versions of the mattress + internals; product CMF probably took about a solid week, maybe even longer (so many shaders between the top quilt, outer encasement, zippers, latex, coils, pouches, covers, etc.) and the environment/lighting was probably about the same? The animation and camera work were also pretty time-consuming, because so many separate files/shots had to be built out, with a lot of trial and error / shots thrown out along the way-- probably a handful of weeks total there too. And while I was doing that, Arman (who did all the soft-body dynamics) was working in tandem, so probably about the same amount of time on his end. All-in probably ~2 months and a few weeks on the farm, rendering?

We also had to work in this really annoyingly backwards workflow because KS can't export camera animations. So I'd end up setting up a shot, then send a preview of it to Arman along with the static starting position of the camera + lens/FOV/DOF details, transform/movement numbers, etc. and he'd manually recreate the same camera movements...but it's never perfect so he'd then send me HIS camera and I'd import that back into KS and manually reenter DOF details and finally we'd have a perfect match so we could composite seamlessly (between Max/VRay and KS)...  Haha we're scarred from this one..

Re: materials, no scans were used; everything was kind of "old school" and created inside KS with a combination of procedural patterns/displacements, generic fabric PBR's for the basic cotton/weave (can't remember from where, maybe CG Axis), custom quilt patterns/maps (the side quilt pattern was a bitch because I had to create a tileable pattern in Illustrator and then bring into PS to make displacements, normal maps, stitching/ticking patterns, etc.-- to make custom normal maps, I used ShaderMap4), etc. I'll attach a few examples of the tiles!

[sloanelliot]

This is stunning work! Great effort from your team

Thank you!

[Will Gibbons]

Okay, this is nutty! So good. Can I ask how long this project took from start to finish? Seems like some tricky workflow, but you really pulled it off. And as far as materials go, did you use any scanned textures or were they all created in KeyShot or somewhere else?

Great job!

Haha thanks, man! Really means a lot..

I'm not sure I could even say for sure on time because the client took well over a month each time we submitted anything for feedback (total radio silence), not to mention their internal Creative Director quit/relocated about a month after we signed on to do the project haha.. It was a mess. I bid 60sec and the final ended up exactly double that (the above version is our 60sec "fun" edit), but a lot of scope creep w/the owners making creative decisions. If I had to break it down into dedicated time, modeling took maybe ~2 weeks for all three versions of the mattress + internals; product CMF probably took about a solid week, maybe even longer (so many shaders between the top quilt, outer encasement, zippers, latex, coils, pouches, covers, etc.) and the environment/lighting was probably about the same? The animation and camera work were also pretty time-consuming, because so many separate files/shots had to be built out, with a lot of trial and error / shots thrown out along the way-- probably a handful of weeks total there too. And while I was doing that, Arman (who did all the soft-body dynamics) was working in tandem, so probably about the same amount of time on his end. All-in probably ~2 months and a few weeks on the farm, rendering?

We also had to work in this really annoyingly backwards workflow because KS can't export camera animations. So I'd end up setting up a shot, then send a preview of it to Arman along with the static starting position of the camera + lens/FOV/DOF details, transform/movement numbers, etc. and he'd manually recreate the same camera movements...but it's never perfect so he'd then send me HIS camera and I'd import that back into KS and manually reenter DOF details and finally we'd have a perfect match so we could composite seamlessly (between Max/VRay and KS)...  Haha we're scarred from this one..

Re: materials, no scans were used; everything was kind of "old school" and created inside KS with a combination of procedural patterns/displacements, generic fabric PBR's for the basic cotton/weave (can't remember from where, maybe CG Axis), custom quilt patterns/maps (the side quilt pattern was a bitch because I had to create a tileable pattern in Illustrator and then bring into PS to make displacements, normal maps, stitching/ticking patterns, etc.-- to make custom normal maps, I used ShaderMap4), etc. I'll attach a few examples of the tiles!

Well, as crazy as this whole thing sounds, I can relate to how much growth and learning occurs in these. And workflows like this expose weaknesses in tools. There's lots of good insights here in ways KeyShot could be improved too. Thanks for sharing, and kudos!

[sloanelliot]

Okay, this is nutty! So good. Can I ask how long this project took from start to finish? Seems like some tricky workflow, but you really pulled it off. And as far as materials go, did you use any scanned textures or were they all created in KeyShot or somewhere else?

Great job!

Haha thanks, man! Really means a lot..

I'm not sure I could even say for sure on time because the client took well over a month each time we submitted anything for feedback (total radio silence), not to mention their internal Creative Director quit/relocated about a month after we signed on to do the project haha.. It was a mess. I bid 60sec and the final ended up exactly double that (the above version is our 60sec "fun" edit), but a lot of scope creep w/the owners making creative decisions. If I had to break it down into dedicated time, modeling took maybe ~2 weeks for all three versions of the mattress + internals; product CMF probably took about a solid week, maybe even longer (so many shaders between the top quilt, outer encasement, zippers, latex, coils, pouches, covers, etc.) and the environment/lighting was probably about the same? The animation and camera work were also pretty time-consuming, because so many separate files/shots had to be built out, with a lot of trial and error / shots thrown out along the way-- probably a handful of weeks total there too. And while I was doing that, Arman (who did all the soft-body dynamics) was working in tandem, so probably about the same amount of time on his end. All-in probably ~2 months and a few weeks on the farm, rendering?

We also had to work in this really annoyingly backwards workflow because KS can't export camera animations. So I'd end up setting up a shot, then send a preview of it to Arman along with the static starting position of the camera + lens/FOV/DOF details, transform/movement numbers, etc. and he'd manually recreate the same camera movements...but it's never perfect so he'd then send me HIS camera and I'd import that back into KS and manually reenter DOF details and finally we'd have a perfect match so we could composite seamlessly (between Max/VRay and KS)...  Haha we're scarred from this one..

Re: materials, no scans were used; everything was kind of "old school" and created inside KS with a combination of procedural patterns/displacements, generic fabric PBR's for the basic cotton/weave (can't remember from where, maybe CG Axis), custom quilt patterns/maps (the side quilt pattern was a bitch because I had to create a tileable pattern in Illustrator and then bring into PS to make displacements, normal maps, stitching/ticking patterns, etc.-- to make custom normal maps, I used ShaderMap4), etc. I'll attach a few examples of the tiles!

Well, as crazy as this whole thing sounds, I can relate to how much growth and learning occurs in these. And workflows like this expose weaknesses in tools. There's lots of good insights here in ways KeyShot could be improved too. Thanks for sharing, and kudos!

We had a long thread of emails with their support on this during the early stages, and even had a video call to try and troubleshoot what was going on (that ultimately forced us to ditch our entire interior), but we legitimately stumped every member of the support team and then everybody kind of went radio silent (I don't blame them). I could write a book on small improvements KS could implement that would make a massive impact on collaborative projects like this / stuff that would dramatically improve the scalability of the software in more of a "studio" environment. Don't even get me started on asset management haha.. But I also respect / don't underestimate the developmental challenges ahead for them on that front. I've just noticed a trajectory where a lot of folks leave the platform for C4D or similar because of some of these basic challenges as they start to scale..

[Kuba Grabarczyk]

@sloaneliot I have same feelings. Making anything more complex than basic product overview shots and simple camera movements in Keyshot makes things extremely hard. There is plenty of room to make soft "studio ready", I am struggling same issues as you do. Btw I never use Keyshot cameras, always import them via Alembic from Blender, it provides way better flexibility.

Could you say a few words about DoF? Did you use Keyshot inbuilt option or it was added in postproduction in After Effects?

[sloanelliot]

@sloaneliot I have same feelings. Making anything more complex than basic product overview shots and simple camera movements in Keyshot makes things extremely hard. There is plenty of room to make soft "studio ready", I am struggling same issues as you do. Btw I never use Keyshot cameras, always import them via Alembic from Blender, it provides way better flexibility.

Could you say a few words about DoF? Did you use Keyshot inbuilt option or it was added in postproduction in After Effects?

Haha it's always a struggle in KS!

I would prefer to do camera animations outside of KS, but often the problem is: a lot of these projects start out as still images first, so I'll do a full CMF buildout in KS and then when the client says they want animation, I get kind of stuck in KS because most object-level animation is done in KS with no way to export that (so I could animate a camera around in outside of KS). And doing complete animations (like exploded-views etc.) outside of KS and importing them has its own set of issues, esp. if you're relying on NURBS/curved parts that would otherwise read as tessellated up-close / macro. There's always a workaround, but usually with each workaround there's a secondary sacrifice to be made haha.. So I have to choose my battles!

On DoF, I usually render it in vs. using depth pass, but sometimes if render times become too high that's a nice fallback, just never produces "as good" of results. I've heard a few times that "DoF Pro" (plugin) is great, but haven't tried it yet..

ALSO: this one is key-- sometimes you have to deal with noise/graininess in DOF areas because render times to clean it up would be waaaay too high, so there's a plugin by Neat Video called Denoiser (for AE) that is absolutely stunning. You wouldn't believe how noisy all of these shots were before that, and the nice thing is, you can use the clown pass to color key out regions (via adjustment layers) and apply varying NR algorithms to different parts/shaders, where some are more problematic than others (vs. blanket application to whole frame, for example).. Def. worth looking into.

[Kuba Grabarczyk]

This is so comforting to me, someone has same issues I face

We always do all animations/cameras animations outside KS and import evertyhing via alembic. I do agree it brings a lot of problems and usually this is very time-consuming process. Export/import parameters optimization, dividing files for smaller etc. And it is very ineffective when we need to make some modifications, it means beasically starting from scratch with materials, importing etc.

I also used to do DoF in AE using depth pass with not very stunning results. I have to check the DoF plugin for AE too, already heard good recommendations but never had time to test it (it's not cheap btw if I remember correctly)

Thank you for denoising plug-in recommendation, I definitely need to test it. So far, I used to avoid any denoising tools as I was afraid of getting not consistent results across animation frames. If you say it's worth checking, I will give it a try, thank you,

[sloanelliot]

Thank you for denoising plug-in recommendation, I definitely need to test it. So far, I used to avoid any denoising tools as I was afraid of getting not consistent results across animation frames. If you say it's worth checking, I will give it a try, thank you,

Give it a try! It's a bit complicated at first so be sure to read some tutorials etc., but the idea is that you select a target region inside the frame and let it scan for the noise patterns, and then you can customize temporal filtering and a million other things-- I've found that if you're getting less than favorable results, it's usually user error, not the program haha.. Usually the default settings lean pretty heavy on NR so you'll want to play with all settings and also try Advanced Mode (tons more options there). There are some tricks for various use cases etc. but worth the effort, it has saved me a landslide of render time over the past few years..