A new product video done in Blender by BlackBoard.
Serj Maiorov - animator at studio BlackBoard wrote a few words about the working process
In BlackBoard studios we use Blender for all of our 3D animation projects and this time was no different. This time we present you a new product movie for a new oral hygiene product.
For this product video we had to research how gum Inflammation looks like. So on one screen I worked and textured, and on the other I had gum Inflammations on Google images as reference. Lets say that it wasn't pretty and every visitor we had during the project was terrified by the sightings...
Our first goal was to avoid real fluid simulation as possible, because it's easier to change things at need and not to wait for the fluid to bake every time. For a more smooth contact, we used Dynamic Paint to feather the contact on the surface, and with
another DP system to erase the dirt. We tried to use Dynamic Paint again as an emission texture for the particles but for some reason it didn't work quite well, so we animated a plane manually. Extra micro particles for more variation and post were done with AFX.Our second challenge was to reduce render time. We were surprised to see some frames that took 8 minutes(!) to render, even with our modern GPUs. So I tried to combine Cycles with the Internal. After a lot of tests I found out that the diffuse and SSS passes were much faster in the Internal, but as I mixed it with reflections - it hogged render time a lot. Needless to say that believable glass/liquid shading is much harder to achieve than in Cycles. So I combined Internal diffuse and SSS passes with Cycles plus some tricks through the compositor, and voila - approximately 60% less render time!
The main downside with this trick, beside messing around with doubling every scene, is the buffer loading. Every engine needs to load the scene data in order to start, and with many objects and particularly with particles - sometimes it takes more time than the rendering itself. So with two engines in the mix, the user have to see if its worth it. And apparently the order between the engines is crucial - if Cycles runs first, the Internal's render is slower.
Overall it was an interesting project to experiment with and we hope that our conclusions will help other users!
