The Mill's Jordi Bares on the Massive Effects

In this video from SIGGRAPH, joint head of 3D at visual effects company The Mill Jordi Bares explains how they used Massive software to created billions of bodacious beauties for Lynx antiperspirant. The :60, directed by Frederick Bond via MJZ, features hundreds of thousands of blondes, brunettes and Asian women flocking from all corners of the earth to capture the ultimate prize: a man scented with Lynx.

To Watch the completed commercial Click Here.

To Watch Jordi Bares explain the visual effects process on this commercial, click below.

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Footage shot by Crews Control (www.crewscontrol.com).

Of course the live action shoot only included about 20 actresses for each shot so The Mill was tasked with adding thousands of CG women. The work combined laborious Flame work headed up by Giles Cheetham and advanced crowd creation work made in 3D by a team led by Bares, Rick Walia and Eric Deltour.

Following the shoot in LA, a motion capture session was carried out at AudioMotion facilities. This featured girls of different body shapes walking, running, wading and climbing. Their movements were digitally recorded to give the CG models natural movement and flow. Using the software Massive, armies of girls were created to stream across the various types of terrain. The software allowed the artificial girls to have their own ‘brains’ meaning they could react to each other and alter their behaviour accordingly. These intelligent Massive girls were then set free to interact with the live action girls and the composited Flame girls.

The final shot posed a particular challenge and was an impressive effect to achieve. The task was tackled by taking the original plate and matching in a matte painting eight times the size of the shot ‘ creating an artificial horizon. The 3D geometry was added and then the plate was populated with over 100,000 CG girls.

Another challenge was the always difficult problem of tracking over water and tracking swimmers over water from a moving helicopter was particularly tricky. As well as using their talented team, The Mill received some additional consultancy from software manufacturer, Boujou for a joint effort in achieving the result. The shot was finally defeated by a combination of hand tracking and some expert Boujou knowledge.