This spot involved close collaboration with director Toby Pike and art team, crafting together  on-set plates and miniatures with extensive CG environments, fx and animated elements, to take viewers on an evolutionary journey through an engineer’s mind of the design inspiration for the relaunched Hyundai Kona as she conjures up the different  KONA features being assembled under the playful watch of space-eyeballs. The spots fuses reality and magic realism, with VR game overtones as we follow the Kona from the conceptual origami model through digital clouds and spaceworld onto a cubist bridge into a futuristic neon cityscape.

The effects were primarily worked in 3D Equaliser, May, Redshift,Flame.

Some of the creative and technical challenges and highlights were in the creating, rigging and animating of  the ‘sky eyes’ and flying papers to give the nuances and direct viewer engagement, and for our floating effect, mManipulating higher frame rates helped enable the zero weight - gravity defiance.

Eyes: 

Thousands of stars turn into blinking eyes what are mesmerized by the engineers thoughts.
Blinking and searching eyes have purpose, and create a train of thought as they over above the floating engineer.  Their attention and fascination locked onto the 

Fur with 3D volumetric shading effect is traditionally CG heavy, so a a special set up was created to deliver these on a tighter turnaround than normally possible. 

Specific rig attributes were created to enable the animator to create the expressions for the story.

The biggest challenge was to have about 15  eyeballs, not just randomly blink, but to have them interact with the plate and each other that directs attention and adds to the magic realism.

Clouds:
The volumetric look of the ‘digital’ clouds was made possible by creating texture reference objects for the procedural textures used in each cube in the cloud, which gives the illusion that the cube is actually containing a fluid volume inside, an achievement close to as if having simulated the effect, which was a cool and efficient approach.

Cubes:
There were hundreds of cubes which demanded a tailored scripting for ease of iteration.

Paper:
The hand-made paper model car was scanned and retopologised in Blender before being passed onto our Houdini artists for simulation and rendering. 

Working off a 3D scan of the paper/origami car as well as an actual car model, it was remodelled in Blender, in a way that it could be “torn apart” in Houidini. 

Animated in Maya, the hero flying papers were a big challenge to make them look realistic in their simulated floating. 

Each individual sheet had controls to bend and fold in the big areas, and small control to manage the corners with more detail.