First Visitors was created in the build-up to Changi Jewel opening their stunning new building to showcase what visitors can expect and get the public excited about the beauty of the new go-to destination as well as make them aware of the shopping inside. The journey our characters take carefully balanced showing off the interior of the building in its full beautiful greenery as well as showing some of the shops at Changi Jewel, all whilst still keeping an engaging story that would give our characters real personalities.

The project progressed over 1 year whilst the building was still being built. This came with the challenge that true final reference was impossible to get as the location was under construction as well as the occasional issue with the interior design changing over the production process.

The aim was to execute a Pixar like quality product and get clear emotional pull out of our 2 characters the ladybug and pacific swallow. The characters were developed with anthropomorphic characteristics added to make it easier to sell the emotions.

The work was done using Maya for 3D and rendered in Vray, compositing was done in Nuke and final editing was done in Premiere Pro. The process followed a classic animation approach. Starting in locking down ref, developing the look of the characters with our concept artist, then building all of our models in 3D. We were provided with the 3D architect's plans of the building that helped save time in modelling Jewel. What took a considerable amount of time was the amount of greenery and foliage inside of Jewel, which of course is a unique selling point and needed to look great. With the amount of foliage required, this was pushed our machines to the extreme as each instance of tree added more complexity to the scene. We timed our process so that we could use the long Xmas break to output final renders at maximum quality and this paid off in allowing us to get more passes output without having to worry about extra render times.

Throughout the process, the Changi team were receptive to creatives input and left a lot of free reign to do as we saw best, this gave the animators and artists more time to work on perfecting small details to benefit the overall final look and realism of the project.

Changi Jewel - First Visitors

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