Disney's 50th Homecoming Celebration:

The high success of Pixar's 3D content, coupled with the apparent low returns on 2D Animated Features, has prompted some executives to wrongfully conclude that the public is no longer interested in hand drawn cartoons anymore.   But the fact of the matter is-- it's actually the lack of good storytelling that turns audiences off.  Pixar has always put story first, and this is the true lesson that should have been gleaned by those in power...

Jumping on the 3D bandwagon after the continued streak of successful Pixar  films, Disney had been slowly & silently beefing up it's DVD releases with flashy 3D intros, airbrushing covers of 2D characters to look 3D and more recently, creating  their own in-house 3D content, "Chicken Little", to directly compete with Pixar at the box office.

So, it was only a matter of time before the idea of retrofitting classical hand drawn characters into 3D, would happen.  Since Disney was busy doing their own 3D movies (Toy Story 3, Chicken Little, Repunzel, etc.), film pipelines have typically slower turnaround, and movie people sometimes have a negative attitude about doing lowly "commercial" work; these spots were subcontracted outside of the Mouse's facilities.  Ironically enough, due to the massive layoffs from their 2D divisions-- many of the artists that worked on these spots were once Disney employees.

The ramp up time on "Homecoming", the first 3D Disney Ad in the series, was about 3 months.  It was a huge undertaking.  There were around 20 characters that were story boarded to appear in a single 30 second TV commercial.  It was like working on a mini movie.  My task was to create Fur or Feather FX for the various characters.  I ended up creating textures for Donald & his Nephews, Goofy, Mickey, Iago, Cinderella's Horses, Rutt & Tuke, and that funky blue alien with all the teeth-- Stitch.

Below are a number of examples of Stitch, test poses for Donald & Rutt the Moose, and an animated example of how I created a pelt for the 3D version of Tuke, from "Brother Bear".  This quicktime video details the various stages of styling a creatures pelt-- from base model, to final styling.  Check it out, below!
                      
Magic Box:

This was the second Disney commercial in the "Homecoming" series, and it stars Goofy in a warehouse filled with "movie props" from various past Disney films.  If you have a chance, you should Tivo it, and step through the frames to identify as many objects as you can.

I got to do some rough lighting for the set and some incidental modeling.

Interestingly enough, the tombstone I modeled from the Haunted Mansion was later  dropped, since it made the spot feel too creepy.   I include it here as an example of my modeling and texturing skills.  The original reference I had to work with, was very low resolution...


Too creepy?
Wish:

While "Magic Box" was being produced, I got to spend most of my time Lighting and Texturing the environment & characters for this commercial.  I was very happy that my supervisor allowed me the freedom of coming up with a master lighting scheme and then implement it in every character shot.  The backdrop was created in 2D by the Compositing Department, while I created the grassy knoll with a soft breeze blowing through it, for the toons to perform in.

These were fun spots to work on, as all the Maya Animators and Texturing & Lighting people were all grouped into the same area for production.  Some of those people are crazy, but quite entertaining!  Both "MB" and "Wish" took just 6 weeks to create, concurrently.  Thank Angie for PIE DAY! 
                  
Toon Takeover:

Probably the last in this series of 3D Disney Ads, "Toon Takeover" ends back pretty much where it started with the first one-- tossing in almost every 3D model that had been built.  And like most projects with more characters than time to show anything for very long; there is far less story behind what the character's are doing.  "Wish" and especially "Magic Box" had much better character motivation.

The third image from the lower left, is from a Space Mountain shot that was pulled from the original edit and ultimately replaced by simple text slates on black, with large print.  This was probably done by the Ad agency at the last minute, to hammer into the viewer what was going on...  But I've included a sample image so you can see what you missed by such a change.  Stitch originally had 4 shots of his own in which he appeared to be having so much fun that at the end of the spot, he's disoriented and falls down in joyous fatigue.  I feel the gag's been weakened a tad by the final edit, but I never get to make those kind of calls.  I don't get to design the puzzle; I only get to make the pieces.

Most of my role in this final spot, was to get Stitch into shape for this ad.  We reused all the content from the previous shows, which meant that Stitch needed to have his motorcycle gloves removed & his paws furred,  so they matched the rest of his now naked body.  A morph was created to turn the open fingered gloves of the original Stitch, into the fully furred version you see in this ad.  My thanks to John and Farid for making these changes to the rig so I could create the texture updates.   And a special thank you goes to Ronin, for the delicate UV fixes to the seam in the back of the mesh, that didn't make the MDD's from Maya blow up.

Stitch's pelt was completely restyled so I could improve his render times.  The original SAS application was very dense and short like velvet, but since the client had gotten used to the idea of putting more naturalistic textures on him, instead of thinking in terms of "Shark Skin", I was able to get away with using a slightly shaggier look that only took half the time to render over the original fiber styling.

Having only 4 shots to work on, I got done early and helped other people do element passes for their shots.  The elevator example below, shows how mostly black fur (with different spec properties) can enhance the volume of a shape while imparting an appealing soft look; without making the model look off character.  The SAS settings are the same as those used on "Wish", with different lighting.

It's been about 9 months of work in total, but I'm pretty happy with the way these spots have turned out.  I've learned a lot in the process and look forward to even more challenging projects in the future.