1st 2005 Soulcage Commercial

[Elm]

Hi Folks.

 

Feel free to ckek our first commercial in 2005. As always under "Our work" at soulcage-department.de.

 

Greetings, the Soulcagers.

 

[pixelmech]

Really great - I'm new here and looked at your site yesterday and I'm blown away by the work you guys do - it's really great and a definite inspiration. Keep up the good work.

 

Tom

[smwolke]

Fabulous work. I never thought I would enjoy watching a commercial, over and over again.

 

Also as Tom notes, thanks for the inspiration

 

steve

[John Bigboote]

Well done! I didn't see the 'shrinking' at 1st...too funny!

 

Here's direct link:

 

http://www.soulcage-department.de./New/Index-E.html

[Paul Forwood]

Well done to all at Soulcage!

 

That's a great start to 2005!

[KenH]

Quality as usual. It seems like Saturn have sole ownership of SoulCage! Hope now as I can see you guys making a movie someday.

 

All those people! Did you make them specifically for this ad and do they all use the same rig?

Also, what was the noise coming out of his mouth? lol It didn't sound human somehow.

[Rodney]

This almost looks like an edited version... hey now... what gives!

He closes his mouth while singing there for a milisecond which leads me to think we are missing something... and edit just before that and no one would be the wiser.

 

Ah well... otherwise perfection.

[JTalbotski]

Okay, which one of you supplied the singing voice?

 

Great quality, as usual. Thanks for giving us a look.

 

Jim

[ypoissant]

Great job!

 

How did you model all those characters? You must be on very high octane cafeine

[Elm]

Hi! As you can possibly see, the audience consists of only two characters - a male and a female. These two characters have poses with different face shapes, suit colours as well as different accessoires like glasses an stuff. by turning in these different poses, the variety within the audience comes into existence. The closeup audience (Bank director, his wife and "the General") are reused models from older clips of ours. maybe you guess from which ones?

 

Thanks for commenting on this one,

love and greetings from all of us!

[Zaryin]

Yeah, but who sat there making all those facial poses! Awesome ani and texturing, and modeling, and... everything.

[Elm]

Yeah.. bwooiii Thanks.

[Elm]

Hi.

 

Here's a larger version:

 

http://www.soulcage-department.de/Saturn-Neujahr.mov

 

Greetings,

[shaunf]

Very funny!!!!! You guys just keep punching them out.

Nothing like a good idea and a bucket load of hard work to make a clip work!

[mediaho]

Finally got to see this. Yawn. Another brilliant piece from you guys. You're becoming too predictable!

[Shazam3D]

Hi.

 

Here's a larger version:

 

http://www.soulcage-department.de/Saturn-Neujahr.mov

 

Greetings,

The link is broken

[jo b.]

sorry, we had to make some space on our server a few day ago. maybe it was deleted as well.

[Dalemation]

Excellent. Your work is exactly the kind of CG animation I like to see. The characters are not photorealistic but brilliantly designed cartoons. I never would have guessed you only modeled 2 characters for the audience btw. Ingenious!

 

I assume the shrinking was achieved with modeling within a pose aswell?

[jo b.]

thnx.

 

yeah, we did a skeletal pose with certain bones for the overall shrinking + plus a muscle deformation to avoid certain unwanted deformations. than the pose was used as a basis for the action. we had to do a lot of "muscle point cloth simulation" for the whole clothing which was a real struggle. during the production we found out that it wasn't the best way of doing that.

 

- the skeletal pose was more x/z shrinking than y shrinking. whenever some childbones were rotated a little to far, the head, hands or fingers for example, they were deformed in a unpropotional way which looked total strange. that meant that the charakter couldn't move a lot during the clip.

 

- the scaling of the bones had just 2 keyframes (0-100), in the pose and in the animation as well. but somehow the resulting deformation wasn't linear. gotta have something to do with the complex structure of the charakter. like: the slipping of the feet in due to the scaling.

 

but as alsways we didn't have the time to look for another solution. the whole clip was produced in 3 weeks with just 4-5 people, plus some serious corrections by our client. so we struggeled on and were quite supprised how "well" it all turned out. there are still some things that we'd loved to have worked on a little more on,(i guess this was bad grammar) but we're glad everyone likes it.