A Bond for Life - CINEMA 4D and Steiff Stuffed Bears

The Hamburg, Germany agency Elephant Seven was given the job of creating a website for the introduction of the so-called "EnkelPolice" (grandparent-police) for Allianz Insurance.

Together with Steiff® (manufacturers of high-end stuffed teddy bears) a teddy bear was designed that would accompany the site's navigation and theme. This bear was to be at the heart of short introductory animations for each of the website's categories.

In March 2007, elephantseven asked Vreel 3D Entertainment to create conceptual artwork and test animations for the project. The first hurdle that was encountered was the fact that the teddy bear had to be depicted as realistically as possible but only a prototype from the physical modeling phase was available. In addition to the fact that the look of the bear's fur had not yet been defined, the bear's final form underneath its fur was also still unclear. The bear model had to be created so the bear would not significantly "expand" as a whole when the hair was applied. Constant comparison with photographs and a lot of visual judgment had to be used.

After the basic form of the bear had been established, the model to be used for animation was created. "We used the new joint and morphing tools in CINEMA 4D R10. The automatic weighting and the fact that corrections to deformations could be Ôpainted' onto the corresponding locations helped us quickly test various joint setups." Although a teddy bear doesn't move like a real bear, the Steiff® bear nevertheless had to be able to move freely. The fur that was to be added later was taken into account when creating the movements. Special attention was paid to the harmonious deformability of joints in order to avoid unwanted intersection of hair and geometry.

"We planned from the very beginning to use the CINEMA 4D HAIR module for the creation of the bear's fur. The HAIR module offered all necessary settings needed to accurately generate hair on our model. The bear's fur was created by automatically placing hair guides onto polygon selections and manually "painting" hair onto selected surfaces. This allowed us to very closely match the look of the prototype. Despite the high number of hairs that were generated and the fact that more than one bear appeared in some scenes render times still remained very manageable. This was paramount for the success of the entire project since we had only three weeks to create a bear that met the customer's specifications and to create several animations featuring that bear."

Finally, elephantseven converted all animations to Flash animations and sound was added. The final project can be seen at www.allianz.de.

Info

Agentur:
Elephant Seven GmbH

Kunde:
Allianz AG
Steiff

3D Artists:
Arndt v. Koenigsmarck, Ulf Ohnesorge von Vreel 3D Entertainment


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