The Mill+ creates a host of colorful characters, including dancing camels, pirates, pharaohs and parrots, all led by a LEGO dragon which sweeps through the city, mimicking the iconic LEGOLAND rollercoaster ride.
The Mill+ recently collaborated with agency BMB to create LEGOLAND’s action-packed new spot “Awesome Awaits,” featuring millions of CG LEGO bricks brought to life by the power of animation.
The global campaign, directed by Russell Tickner out of Mill+, aims to capture the magnetic and universal appeal of LEGOLAND. It sees a host of characters come to life in a young boy’s bedroom, before spilling onto the streets and triumphantly arriving at the gates of the theme park. The host of colorful characters, which includes dancing camels, pirates, pharaohs and parrots, are led by a LEGO dragon, which sweeps through the city, mimicking the iconic LEGOLAND rollercoaster ride.
Each character was carefully concepted, designed and crafted by the 3D team over several months before being animated and brought to life, utilizing millions of CG LEGO bricks. It was then the job of the 2D team to blend all of the CG LEGO renders and matte paintings into live action plates, captured during the shoot in Cape Town.
“This project gave us the opportunity to flex our creative muscles and create a really dynamic and fun piece that captures the magic of a LEGOLAND day out,” comments Dave Fleet, the Mill’s joint head of 3D. “The project utilized a range of disciplines, meaning we had to streamline the process in the most effective way possible, to deal with the many millions of CG LEGO bricks created.”
To start, characters were modeled as polygonal meshes, and then rigged and animated, passing from Autodesk Maya to SideFX’s Houdini using Mill+’s custom caching format. “At this point the animators would also export what we refer to as a callsheet,” Fleet recounts. “This is basically a live list of ingredients that go into each scene. Russell and the animators were regularly changing characters, so it was vital to make this as easy as possible so the FX and lighting teams were always up to date.”
To help turn the animated characters into bricks, Mill+ artists employed Bricker, a proprietary plugin developed at The Mill. “Bricker was seamlessly integrated into our existing pipeline and automatically picked up animation updates and knew when new characters got added or removed from a shot,” Fleet details. “As LEGO bricks come in all different shapes and sizes we built sliders within the tool so the artist could decide which bricks were used and ultimately how the character was built.”
The Pirate ship contained roughly three million individual LEGO bricks, not including the huge wave it was riding. With optimization features such as camera culling and hollowing out the characters, Bricker helped save on bricks and sped up the whole workflow.
The bricked characters were then passed onto The Mill+ Lighting team as a huge point cloud, each point representing the location and color of a brick. “This allowed our lighting scenes to be very lightweight as the LEGO bricks themselves are only created at render time using Arnold’s powerful instancing system,” Fleet explains.
Watch the making-of video, below:
Source: The Mill
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
