For this project, i had been seeing a lot of different ads on social media for jewelery across things like Instagram and snapchat. Throughout the course i hadn’t had much if any time to work on things like advertisements, and having worked on ads before, i wanted to create a short ad to build this skill for both my portfolio, as well as both learning blender and practicing with illustrator and after effects again. I originally made a presentation to show my professor regarding pitching this idea for this ad.
I wanted to follow the way that most ads are done in this by making two 30s versions at 16×9 and 9×16 with 15s cutdowns as well as a pairing 4×5 in instagram formats.
I wanted to make this a fully CG Ad similar to some ads i had seen in the past like a lot of Apple’s ads with high quality renders and motion graphics.
In terms of programs i wanted to use ZBrush, Blender and Houdini. I ended up using just blender, as i wanted to try high quality modelling without ZBrush as i had used it before, and chose to do my fluid dynamics in Blender instead of Houdini to learn it in Blender instead.
•With this project I wanted to challenge myself to make something shorter and work more on refining something small rather then to create something large as I wanted quality over quantity with this project. Some of the challenges that would be presented with this were creating logos properly that would look professional, creating these animated supers and logos in After Effects as it’s something I haven’t done in a while. I also had no knowledge of blender going into this semester, so i would have to learn it from the ground up.
I detailed and outlined each of the scenes i wanted to do, these were all approximates of what i wanted to create and acted as rough storyboards that would guide what i was doing. Towards the end i decided to cut out the comp shots, as i wanted to focus on the 3D only and i had more then enough shots by the end without them.
I started off by simply learning some basic things in blender like simple objects and making rings by making toruses and using proportional editing and selecting edge loops, after this i learned about using lights, adding bloom and effecting render settings, and pluging in textures in the shader node graph. Throughout the next couple of weeks, i learned about key shortcuts from the blender website, as well as using the cloth dynamics in blender, and freezing those cloth transformations to create a realistic cloth to sit on a podium and hold the jewellery. Next i went about creating the first ring being a black marble tear stone ring. i did this by separating the textures and then adjusting the edge loops. This took a while but i was successful in the end. For the second ring i wanted to make an okami face on a ring, but decided i would make an SVG Of this in illustrator and come back to it. Next i decided to make the crow skull, this took a long time as i wasn’t familiar with Blender’s sculpting functions. i used my tablet for a lot of this and went through some variations with cutting holes in the mesh of the necklace and using a reference image plane, ultimately i didn’t use the dynotop feature in blender for the necklace to model, as it does create more polys and give a more detailed mesh, but i wanted to try one necklace with this and one without to compare results. Next i went about creating a watch that was a lot more difficult then anticipated. This is due to the fact that some of the modifiers in Blender can be extremely frustrating. To use an array in blender, if you want it circular you need to mess around with adding an empty to that object and then moving the empty to try and align it into a circle, this took a long time to get right but i did eventually get it. I originally wanted to add an LCD screen to the watch and even started making some animations in after effects, but this was scrapped as i didn’t feel it met the aesthetic i was going for in the end. After this i started using some arrays to make a chain for the necklaces and made a simple wrist strap for the watch, i then went about learning using the dynotop feature for a pirate coin similar to that in pirates of the Caribbean for the last coin. This was a blessing and a curse, as it gave very good detail but also made so many faces that it would constantly lag out my scene. I made one half of it and used a mirror modifier to make the second half as it was only the top half of a cylinder. I Also went about learning texture painting and using texture masking to make the small divots in the coins that would be the darker parts.I liked this coin but the dynotop made it look too detailed inf act and i wasn’t super comfortable with blender’s sculpting yet. i smoothed it out as much as i could to make it less jagged, however i prefered the crow skull in the end and would most likely go about the way of modelling i did with that over dynotop, that being subdividing and then sculpting. I then used the same texture painting techniques i had used on the coin for the crow skull.
It was at this point i took a short break from the project to work on the collab project, then came back and had a lot more experience with blender, i decided to try and get the SVG Ring working and designed a simple okami wolf face in illustrator. i originally had it with a styalized brush, but this caused issues with blender’s SVG creation and decided to just make a simple outline.
Something i learned from this is that SVG’s need an extremely specific way or the mesh will be extremely unorthodox and not interact well with lighting or anything else. I went about using the clean up mesh tools to do what i could and a solidify modifier to properly make the geometry. I then texture painted the colours on and was happy enough with it to consider it done.
Next i started doing small things like modifying the wrist straps for the watch and starting to decimate things in my scene as it was becoming too high poly. One thing i shouldn’t have done was decimate collapse my ring instead of unsubdivivde it, as i was trying to conserve memory i made a permeant edit to it which would become a problem as the ring was now very triangular for the okami face.
After this i then repurposed the plants that i had made in my collab project and texture painted them, as i would use them as background elements near the pedestals i would keep the jewellery on.
Next i did a lot of cleanup, as the scene was extremely heavy and things needed to be decimated to render properly. i went about decimation through unsubdividing and also trying to get a small fluid sim working for the ring with water on it shot.
After this i both animated the clock hands and finally got the fluid sim working, making sure to make a highly transmissive material to use as the water texture. I also started making some of the mograph ring shots by using arrays like i had done for the watch.
I now went through making different cameras and then rendering out my shots and putting them together in premiere. I also started doing some rough logo designs for a logo and finally settled on one i made in illustrator and would animate in After Effects.
Lastly i simply went through going in and editing my advertisement into its cutdowns and aligning shots, animating the logo and making sure things fit together.
I originally wanted to have some text animations, though after looking at a lot of other instagram ads, most didn’t have any, and i felt they wouldn’t work with my ad. I then exported my cutdown versions and uploaded them.
This project presented many challenges, though i’m overall happy with the way it turned out.
Below are the two 16×9 versions
Then the 4×5 versions, however these cannot embed properly as they aren’t 16×9.
30s – https://youtube.com/shorts/8IF8PqIMAP4?feature=share
15s – https://youtube.com/shorts/he6pyp8Xf_8?feature=share
And these are the 9×16 versions