Summer of 2014 was spent largely crafting a 60 second full CG spot that focused on the company's logo of an iceberg. A full 3D iceberg was developed to be seen from entering the water all the way down to the very bottom with the camera closely hugging the sides of the ice behemoth. Three of us were on the project and I mainly focused on modeling, lookdev and lighting duties.
For each major iteration of layout the base shape of the iceberg would change, and for each of those versions I did a detailed sculpt in mudbox so the client could understand what they were looking at in previz. Since the base model was so incredibly lo-rez and I was doing so much manipulation of the shape I ended up making a breadcrumb trail of the camera in cubes and having that in mudbox as a guide for how far I could pull or push the surfaces. I also included some scuba divers placed around the iceberg for size reference so that I could always relate to the scale we were aiming for.
Besides the iceberg, we needed to have hundreds of 'growlers' and 'bergy bits', which are smaller chunks of ice that have calved off. To do this I started with a noise field applied to a mesh in Maya and then removed all interstitial areas. Once I had water tight geos I brought them into Mudbox and began to sculpt them individially up to a medium resolution. I also created 6 hero growlers based on some photographic reference that would be sculpted with higher detail and placed closer to camera. I also wrote a python script that would take the Mudbox export of the hundred something growlers and place them correctly in the Maya scene, facilitating the back and forth between the asset in Mudbox and the set dressed version in Maya.
By far the hardest part of the lookdev was dealing with the subscattering effect in an efficient way for such a large object that would be seen close as well as far. One of the things I did was model the iceberg with it's 'cap' depressed in so that I could strategically place lights closer to the walls at the top of the iceberg to help with it's translucency. This was a cheat somewhat because most of the that beautiful blue wavelength that is seen deep in the ice is originating from the water and getting scattered in. This was way too much to ask of Vray thus the lo-tech approach. It was then broken into all the usual suspect layers some of which are shown here
Some side by side turntables educating the client on the evolution of the iceberg, along with a requested wireframe version of the end frame.
