Swi Christmas Landscape in Miniature

The Swiss broadcaster SRF rolls out more than just wrapping paper for its Christmas campaign

Flash is required! --

Is the moon a cookie or a Christmas ornament? Does snow look more like giftwrap or icing? Can tinsel flow through a Swiss mountain stream? These were some of the questions asked by the creative department as SRF (Swiss Radio & Television) as they worked on the 2012 Christmas campaign. The concept was to recreate the most beautiful scenes from our promotional film as Christmas decoration, said lead designer Patrick Arnecke.

Creating natural landscapes as decoration was an exciting challenge. Another creative challenge was how to steer the viewer's attention in shots with a very high level of detail and thousands of props. We quickly discovered that we had to use selective lighting and reduce the color set. Our materials also had to become more uniform. Even the smallest divergence could mess up the shot, continues Patrick.

We used almost the entire spectrum of CINEMA 4D's comprehensive toolset for the technical realization, from the numerous modeling tools to Dynamics, character animation and particle effects. For example, the waterfall made up of ribbons was created by moving geometry along a spline using the Spline Wrap tool. The Jiggle Deformer object and a turbulence effect were combined to create a natural looking animation.

The snow next to the train tracks had to have a powdery look. This was achieved using a combination of millions of Thinking Particles with a Hair Render tag, which proved to be a good method for quickly rendering extremely large numbers of particles. Spline dynamics and the Cloth feature were used to create Santa's clothing and the strings of lights. The glazing on the ginger bread houses was created using the new Sculpt feature. The ginger bread man was rigged, and animated using MoCap data from the SFR libraries.

The animation was rendered in full HD using VRAYforC4D, and Adobe After Effects was used for compositing and grading.

Swiss Radio and Television (SFR) production team:

Alex Hefter Creative director

Patrick Arnecke Head of design

Wim Mllmann Brand manager

Jrg Dummermuth Senior artist, concept, design, 3D

Simone Nucci Senior artist, concept, design, 3D

Simon Renfer Senior artist, concept, design, 3D

LINK:	http://www.maxon.net/en/news/singleview-default/article/swiss-christma...
	See more stories from maxon

Most recent headlines