This is a short film made for the office soft-seating design for Actiu 2 years ago, which is also on my Behance page here. The audio has been altered dued to copyright issue on Vimeo, if you want to listen to the original song here's a link to the original audio version, however, the video quality is worse.
Enjoy the video and the behind the scene materials if you're interested to know how the sausage was made.
Preproduction
The modeling was done mostly in Blender in a non-destructive workflow (well I tried my best anyway), except that, to achieve the details of a realistic cloth I turned to Marvelous Designer.
The textures mostly come from Quixel Megascan where they provide thousands of 4k high quality photo scanned assets, some simple ones like the metal were made procedurally within Blender.
The set was modeled roughly based on a company where I did 6 months of internship, some changes had to be made so that the lighting and camera positioning would result better.
The mood was set by the contrast between a cloudy drizzling day at the office and the warm steamy coffee placed right at the soft looking lounge chair that is the protagonist of the film. Rough storyboards were drawn to plan those shots, and they really emphasizes the concept and prepare for a smoother editing later. A very shallow depth of field, low contrasty imagery and an almost sleepy hand-held camera movement, all the elements together elevate the comfort level that the film brings.
Production
The rain drop is simply a not so simple procedural texture made by the 3D artist Amin Missaoui. Free to download here.
The steam of the coffee was rendered in a separate file that was imported as a billboard texture due to hardware capability limitation...
The droplets were hand animated using meta ball, because my laptop couldn't afford a proper fluid sim. (in fact, the droplets only appear in a few frames with heavy motion blur so it doesn't really matter that much)
The leaf wiggling was the trickiest part of this project because it's partially a soft body simulation but also armature driven animation, but it's not that different from the same mechanism that was applied on some hair or tentacles animation workflow. (also boobie jiggle)
I named this shot Buttonflies because of the obvious reason:)
Postproduction
If you’re familiar with Eevee you know how tricky it would be to make the first rack focus shot through the rainy window, so the trick is in the compositing, in this case I used Davinci Resolve to put the shots together…
Apart from that, the coffee steam was composited also due to the issue of Evee engine with transparent objects. Then I added anamorphic lens effects such as distortion and some flares, vignette, film grain, right after the color correction and color grading process.
Anyway, thanks for reading till the end, hope you've enjoyed!
