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Cheeriocraft

3

I guess you can sell anything to kids if you turn it into Minecraft ;-)

Joel Gerlach writes:

So it's us again, the guys behind the the Metropolis Logo Sequence we submitted a bit ago. We've had a pretty busy summer! Cheerios approached us with the idea to create a :30 commercial for Cheerios in a video game context. All we were given was "Cheeriocraft, a mix of Cheerios and Minecraft" and nothing else!

So empowered with possibilities, we set out to create an entire world of cheerios using Blender. From the beginning we knew we wanted to create a more photorealistic experience than Minecraft's visuals so we decided to push for a more cinematic interpretation, with realistic cheerios, atmospheric haze and environment lighting that would match the vast wilderness of the world. We also challenged ourselves to try and make every frame of the video 'screenshot worthy', making sure that the world looked beautiful and immersive no matter where you looked.

Then it came down to discovering how Minecraft worked, everything from the world generation to the way the characters moved. We played a lot of Minecraft for this project so we could make easily-recognizeable Minecraft elements for players familiar with the game while adding in our own touches to make it unique for the Cheeriocraft world.

We ran into some pretty crazy obstacles that we had to overcome. Like how could we build an entire world out of a million detailed Cheerios without making Blender's viewport inoperable? How could we simulate things like deserts, mountains, trees using a limited color pallete? How could we make a 1x1x1 minecraft cube into cheerios?

To start, Cobalt built the entire island using an image texture to drive the island's geometry. He then used a Remesh modifier to turn the generated mesh into cubes. A particle system was then used to populate the cubed lanscape with linked assets, mostly Cheerios. Different particle systems were used for each different terrain type. Using the same island geometry we added in particle systems located in specific areas that would drive objects like trees, cacti and flowers. We really took advantage of Blender's linked libraries and proxies so that we could update assets at any time and they'd populate throughout every shot with no re-importing needed.

The timelapse castle build was a pretty challenging thing to animate as well, due to the complexity of the castle mesh itself. We finally landed on a system of keyframing the linked group's visibility in the outliner. Cobalt built different stages of 'completion levels' on each modular section of the castle, which I then keyframed on and off in sequence to create the illusion of cheerios being added in a timelapse fashion. Took a bit of trial and error to get to that point!

We did have a bit of a problem running out of GPU memory with all the "Copying Transformations to Mesh" required to build the island's particle system each frame. Thankfully the guys over at RenderStreet helped us overcome this problem by offloading all of the rendering to their high-performance cloud-based servers. We highly recommend them for rendering, they saved us SO much time and money than rendering it ourselves!

All in all we're super proud of it and hope you guys enjoy it too. Without the Blender forums we wouldn't have overcome some of the significant challenges to pull this commercial off. We did something really cool with the Cheeriocraft world to next but we're waiting to show that off till the right time (shh-secrets!) but for now we're totally stoked to show this off to you all. Because of this commercial, we got a LEGO spot that we're working on now, so we'll be back with more in the future!! Thanks everyone!

Here's a link to our cut of the video:

https://vimeo.com/130726710

Here's an early rough animatic showcasing the island before it was rendered out:

https://vimeo.com/136874159

Here's the final cut that Cheerios has on their YouTube page (we like our version a little more):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu2NPpiIViU

3 Comments

  1. Really impressive!
    Great work!

    A little note to ether M. Gerlach or Bart, the volume of the embedded video should be half the strength by default,
    because it could really damage someone speakers, or ear drums. The only way to minimize the volume is by putting the video full screen. My 2 cents.

    Amazing animation none the less!

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