Redshift and Cinema4D to Create Stunning 3D Promos for McVities Chocolate

VFX Online May 31, 2020, 10:32 am 1.4k Views

Redshift and Cinema4D to Create Stunning 3D Promos for McVities Chocolate

Visual State explains how they used CGI and Redshift for artful snack promos.

Sydney Australia-based production studio, Visual State, is known for doing CGI-driven creative work for clients around the world. So when full-service advertising agency, True Sydney, got in touch to see if the studio could just retouch a few images related to a campaign for British snack food company, McVities, co-founder Ian Connor agreed, but he couldn’t help asking for a few more details about the project.

As it happened, the retouching component was just one small part of a much larger campaign that would contain multiple motion shots featuring the biscuits. True Sydney was undecided on how to create those shots; traditional table-top photography or potentially using CGI. So Visual State asked for the opportunity to show True Sydney what a CGI promo for McVities chocolate-covered pretzels would look like. Using a combination of Redshift and Cinema 4D, they created the pitch overnight and it won them the entire project.

“They thought our approach was awesome,” Connor recalls, adding that he and Visual State co-founder, Danil Gorskikh, spent the next day with the creative director going through a very loose brief and some rough pencil drawings of the shots they wanted. Though they were given a lot of creative freedom, they kept True updated routinely as they worked on a total of 40 stills and 34 animations; all in 4K resolution.

It wasn’t strange that True Sydney first asked Connor to retouch several images. Before teaching himself to use Cinema 4D in 2015, Connor worked as a photographic retoucher for nearly 20 years. He and Gorskikh launched Visual State after working together at a couple of other companies and realizing they made a good team. “I love that you can be the photographer and director when you work in 3D, especially if you’re doing the post on your own work; it’s complete end-to-end control,” Connor says.

After trying out a couple of different renderers, Visual State added Redshift to their pipeline in 2017 and Connor remembers instantly feeling like, “At last!” Now, he doesn’t even think about render times anymore, which was really helpful when they were rendering everything for the McVities project because at the same time, Connor’s wife was just days away from having the couple’s first child. “I was working from home, and I was so grateful to be able to do so many iterations of shading and lighting and know I was going to get great results quickly and easily.”