This full CG commercial was created for the entire BMW I-performance range. It was Directed by Andrew Proctor and all CG elements were created at The Mill Bangalore.
I was in charge of replicating the lighting and animation of the spotlights from the previs created by Andrew. The previs was created in Softimage XSI and rendered using Arnold.
My responsibilities ranged from lookdeving the environment to defining the look of the entire commercial. I was familiar with Softimage but never had a chance to use it in production as it was already deprecated or phased out at most studios. As the brief was to match the animation of the spotlights 1 to 1 in Maya, I was able to export the animated lights from XSI and bring them into Maya using a proprietary file format which was created at The Mill for better interoperability between the two packages. This saved everyone a lot of time and bid days for redoing the animation in Maya for the spotlights, although it was not perfect it made a great starting point to get the ball rolling on all of the shots at once. I was able to dial in and animate a combination of gobos and spotlight cone and other attributes in the Arnold Spotlights along with the atmosphere volume to get the desired look and block out all of the shots and pass them to other artists in the team. This sped up the entire production and we were able to wrap up the project in a very short time.