Commercial: Royal Dragon Jewellery
weeliano writes:
This is probably the first time that Blender 3D is used in a local TV commercial in Singapore. This 15 second TV commercial is produced by Chips & Toon Animation studio. They do mostly 2D animation but are actively seeking to increase their 3D animation portfolio. In this commercial, I helped out in modeling the 3 jewelry pieces; the Jade Diamond Ring, the Red ruby bracelet, and the Dual Dragon Head bracelet. The Dragon model is purchased from TurboSquid, but the original scale texture was not as refined and I re-did the scales texture. Rigging and animation was done by Siew Hui of Chips & Toon. The Cycles renderer proves to be very efficient and high quality, delivering very good final results. I hope that more local studios will see the potential of Blender 3D and start to use it in more productions like this.
Sadly… but it’s very bad. Flickering on jewellery, used hdri. Stock smoke without any match-move. Idea it’s good, but realisation… I’m sad for that, Blender in commercial use looks very poor because we are proud of cheap and ugly realisation like this one. We have many great productions but internet is full of something like this.
Unfortunately . . . I have to agree with JAKUB.
Impressive work! I watched it several times. The modeling of the ring top notch. The dragon modeling and animation is quite nice as well.
As for any suggestions, I would say that enabling motion blur would help significantly in increasing the overall production value (but also adds a significant amount of time to the render). After close inspection, it seems to me that smoke simulation appears to actually be generated by the dragon passing through the smoke, but the quality of the smoke sim is quite low, probably due to hardware limitations. I would add a touch of roughness to the metallic and glass shaders. While they render very quickly at zero roughness, you will find that even just a touch of roughness will add a lot of realism. Lastly, I would add a bit of rim lighting using the Fresnel setting in Layer Weight to further sell the metallic look.
Overall, this is a very nice piece of work, especially considering that it is one of the studio’s first 3D animation jobs — and also considering the hardware limitations they appear to have been dealing with. As possibly the first locally produced 3D commercial made in Blender, I imagine this studio is at the top of their industry for the area and this ad has set a new local standard.
I happen to feel this commercial reflects very well on Blender. It illustrates the global reach the program is achieving, shows that the program is being used by top studios (albeit regional), and that with Blender, good quality animation is possible on a budget and even with low-end hardware. Truly Blender is making 3D accessible to everyone.
Also, I believe there is so much really exceptional and highly visible work done in Blender that anyone doing a remotely serious investigation of Blender will find it.
Well done Chips & Toon! I look forward to seeing your progress as you gain more 3D animation jobs.