Award-Winning Origami in CINEMA 4D

The Hamburg, Germany, agency, Nordpol, was given the job of producing an image film for the sporting goods manufacturer, Asics, called "In Pursuit of Perfection".

The story is about Asics company founder, Kihachiro Onitsuka - from the very beginning to the leading global sporting goods manufacturer of today. By combining stop motion, origami, high-end motion control techniques and state-of-the-art 3D animation, a vivid symbioses between tradition and the modern world was created.

At the outset, a storyboard, an animatic and a sample origami model from the Swiss origami artist, Sipho Mabona were available for reference. Can an athletic shoe be created using origami? What about an octopus? Sipho Mabona astounded Nordpol's creative team again and again by folding one amazing model after another - a tiger, microscope, octopus, a foot - using only a single sheet of square paper.

For the 3D and stop motion crews, the challenge lay in how to create a realistic-looking origami folding animation. The top priority thereby was to make a perfectly seamless transition between real-world film footage and 3D animation.

The artists began by testing different materials in CINEMA 4D and it quickly became clear that two characteristics would be deciding factors in the creation of a realistic paper look - its structure and its color as it relates to the lighting conditions. For further reference, all paper types used by Sipho Mobona were scanned by nform.

Based on their excellent experience using CINEMA 4D's render engine in combination with its seamless connectivity to Adobe's After Effects, the team at Nordpol decided to create mask channels for each object in order to be able to make color correction in post production, if necessary. Furthermore, 16-bit color depth was used to take advantage of even the finest color nuances.

The second challenging phase was the cornucopia of folding steps specified by the storyboard. To tackle this task, Andre Junker, lead 3D animator, developed custom Joint Rigs and Morph Target setups that moved exactly as the origami fold steps specified in the storyboard. To make sure the large amount of animation could be completed on time, nform's Christoffer Wolters (render lead/location) and Andre Junker brought aboard animator Sven Hauth even before the project got started. Sven's experience with CINEMA 4D's animation tools perfectly supplemented the nform team's needs.

In close cooperation with Nordpol, a six-minute animation in origami look was then produced. Thousands of origami tigers were transformed into thirty million pairs of athletic shoes, and these in turn were transformed into various pieces of Asics athletic equipment. Thanks to CINEMA 4D's MoGraph module, these sequences required very little setup time. To improve camera handling, Andre Junker developed a custom camera rig using CINEMA 4D's node-based XPresso tool, which allowed him to animate all pertinent parameters using a minimum of keyframes. This also let him adapt more quickly to changes requested by the director.

In the making of this film, many new and unique animation techniques were successfully brought together. The combination of these techniques culminated in a one-of-a-kind result - and has already received a bronze medal from the adc (art directors club (Germany)), a silver Clio and gold at the New York Festival.

Links

www.nordpol.com
www.nform.tv
www.stoptrick.com
www.pixeldoggy.com
www.adc.de
www.clioawards.com
www.newyorkfestivals.com

Read the entire report in the 03:08 issue of the german magazine digital production!