paradontax - cannes lions case study

Grey London and Hogarth were producing a case study for entry into the Cannes Lions competition on behalf of their client, GSK.

 
I was brought into the project at a very late stage; the filming and motion design and a rough edit had already been produced, as had a 3D-printed concept model of the product; a toothbrush that contained a rapid-results blood test encased in the handle. This is a real global health initiative, and as such we wanted to get as close to the real thing as Cinema 4D's native renderer, Physical, would allow us.

We had a rough 3D model from the 3D printing process, but the topology was unusable. I took a couple of days to retopo the model and make a decent asset, using the modelling tools native to Cinema 4D. Then I exported this model to Unfold3D and got a nice clean UV layout. That model was given a baked AO texture in Cinema and imported into Quixel Suite for a custom plastic bump map and hand-painted AO matte. The art director, Alberto Conde, animated most of the shots using this early version of the model, while I fulminated over the bristles, settling upon a Fur object for each clump of bristles. Editing the Fur object and making it render correctly within Physical took almost four days alone, but by that time the cameras were set up. I lit the scenes using Area lights judiciously to allow for precise rim lighting that I could not achieve with HDRI. Once we'd set up a 23-node Team Render network, we could properly develop the look of the shots, particularly with regard to focal depth blur, which would take too long on one CPU to allow us to process the 16 shots we had to produce. To show the blood test working, I animated a Fractal Noise texture inside After Effects at 4k and applied this video as a texture to the cotton area of the test.

Paradontax - Lifesaver ToothbrushClient: GSK/Paradontax
Studio: Grey London/Hogarth Worldwide
Art Director/3D animation: Alberto Conde
Motion Graphics & Edit: Merethe Rosvold
CG Generalist: Me

Special thanks to Colin Foulkes for Team Render support and Chris at Rendernow.co.uk for their tireless help at crunch time, and to Ben and Rowena for keeping me from fainting/bellowing expletives