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Glassworks Helps Nike Launch a Legend

London-based visual effects studio creates a slick new video to promote Nike’s Legend 6 boxing boot, tapping Redshift’s GPU-accelerated renderer to deliver high-quality visuals on an efficient timeline.

LONDON – Even the most fashion-friendly Nike product is typically a masterpiece of specialization. Jostling for position at the paramount of Nike’s numerous lines is the Nike Tiempo Legend 6. The promotion of this product demanded a promotional video with an equal knack for aesthetic grace and technical efficiency, meaning Nike turned to Glassworks, a post-production facility delivering high-end digital animation and visual effects expertise with operations in the UK, Spain and Holland. Glassworks was tasked with creating a slick and high-end video promoting the Legend 6. In order to render the CG shoe with both efficiency and quality, Glassworks turned to Redshift’s GPU-accelerated renderer.

Serving an outfit with the clout Nike wields meant Glassworks needed to deliver work at immense pace without sacrificing quality. Embarking on the Tiempo Legend 6 project, Glassworks were also greeted with a rather distinct brief. Nike wanted the boot shown at a remarkable level of detail, at a perspective closer almost than that possible with the human eye. While it’s a simple enough concept in theory, implementing it as a high-quality video presented Glassworks with numerous technical challenges.

Nevertheless, for Florian Juri, Glassworks’ director of “Nike Tiempo; Start the Finish”, the Redshift renderer certainly provided what was required.

“From the very beginning it was clear that we needed to show a CG version of the product from an ultra-close point of view, with shallow depth of field combined with rendered motion blur and refractive materials in some shots,” explains Juri. “On previous jobs, when using a different renderer, this specific scenario caused a lot of issues; render times were too high, and a few shots wouldn’t finish in acceptable quality at all. Redshift, meanwhile, enabled us to do all of that, and entirely pain-free.”

While embracing the challenge of combining extremely shallow depth of field with intense motion blur on some elements, Glassworks could deliver super smooth results while keeping frame render times to a handful of minutes. And in the same process, Redshift also granted Glassworks another trick to secure up its sleeve; the ability to construct, at the animatic stage, lower quality renders over and above traditional screen captures; something perfect for working with and suitably impressing the client.

“Redshift is a production-ready renderer with pretty much all features you’d need for 95 per cent of jobs,” explains Juri, looking back on his experience. “It’s incredibly fast, with speed-ups somewhere between five-times to even 60-times in some cases. Redshift’s renderer enables a 3D artist to go through many iterations fast, while making the kind of last minute changes which do happen a lot.”

Redshift’s rendering speed is well recognized across the many industries it serves, but for Juri the benefits it brought to his project did not stop with a boost to working velocity.

“Redshift’s customer support is incredible,” Juri asserts. “The support team is very responsive and helpful, and listens to their customers – that’s really important for us.”

That support allowed Glassworks to hit the standard Nike demanded, with technological friction almost entirely eradicated. When the team discovered occasional bugs, they were fixed almost immediately by the Redshift support team. With a globally significant footwear release drawing near, time was of the essence, and there was no time for Glassworks to wait around for assistance and maintenance.

“In the advertising world we need to work and react fast,” confirmed Juri. “Approximations of a renderer are acceptable if we can get very realistic, pretty much noise-free results, fast.”

Ultimately, the Redshift GPU renderer served a pivotal role in Glassworks’ Tiempo Legend 6 production. It allowed the team under Juri’s direction to respond to the client’s need swiftly, deliver numerous iterations from the 3D art team on a daily basis, and deliver exceptional results at great pace, all while using a relatively small render farm.

“Redshift enables us to render with higher sampling, more diffuse bounces, and increased reflection and refraction depths than ever before, giving us more realistic results, while still hitting low render-times,” offered Juri. “I like the fact that I can use measured material properties like extinction coefficient for my standard architectural shaders to get realistic fresnel effects on reflections, for instance.”

Glassworks’ project masterfully captured the Tiempo boot’s elegance and nuance with flair through slick, sexy visuals that pulse and slide, and all delivered with remarkable speed and minimal fuss. That, of course, is what Redshift’s GPU-powered architecture is all about. The results Glassworks produced here were certainly good enough for the more contemporary incarnation of Nike too. Supported by Redshift, the production company has added another successful piece to its ever-expanding show-reel.

Source: Glassworks