Eerie and Creepy magazines were amazing. My favourite stories were El Cid...the ink work and the dynamism of the bodyforms was stunning.
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Bridgestone Performance Balls
Hey all, This is the project I worked on back in November that really raised my game (no pun intended). Bridgestone Tires decided to have a little fun for their new ad campaign
http://www.youtube.com/user/BridgestoneSuperBowl/videos.
I was originally hired to physically carve the balls in urethane foam.Each ball had a corresponding tread pattern from Bridgestone's high performance tires. There was 4 weeks of fabrication and finishing allotted in the shooting schedule. Though I still love carving, there was just no way to carve five prototype balls,with tread patterns diving toward the poles of the balls. If you have ever had to do a layout on a round or roundish object, then you know what a nightmare it can be. The 4 weeks included all of the molding, casting, and painting, along with all of the art direction changes that go with any job. I convinced my employer, Chris Hyde at Global Entertainment Industries, to do the whole job digitally, and produce the parts on a 3D printer.
I modeled each ball in Zbrush, and used GoZ to Maya and Photoshop, Dynamesh (life saver on this job), Polypaint, UV Master, Decimation Master, and 3D Print exporter. I used Rhino for post processing of the .STL files. Everything was printed on A Zcorp 620 full color printer. Yeah, yeah, I know, the surface is pitted and rough....But not on a full sized ball. A bit of light sanding, some touch up paint, and some logos....Viola!
Pattern and lay out.
STL files.
Basketball
The Bowling Ball
screen grabs
Model
.STL rendered in Zbrush
model
.stl
Really nice work on the Bridgestone stuff Carver, I have been enjoying these spots since I 1st saw them. Congrats!
t.
Very good work! This campaign is very cool, i like this concept. It must be cool to see your 3d work printed and used as real props instead of CG post effects.
Congrats Carver! Very cool work! Cheers, David :D
Really well done, so much cooler to have them as practical objects
Some spin on those ball ... Xcellent saw it yesterday at the game !!!
Haha! Nice! Good job pushing for Rapid Prototyping. They turned out great, and I'm sure they were happy with the quality of the patterns using a 3D printer.
I was not expecting a puck, haha.. The basketball really shows off the tread, especially how the pattern converges on the sides shrinking smoothly.
Congrats!
Todd - Thanks, I think the whole ad campaign is brilliant and different from the standard " See close up of tire devour the road" ads.
Nikholax - It is always a blast to see something you've done emerging from a printer. Most of my career has been creating props and sets for film and Theme Parks. I do love creating in a 3D environment too. Same process with different tools.
Chalkman - As always, thanks for your support.
Drakelot - Thanks. You should check out the whole lot on YouTube!
Maury - Thanks! Rapid prototyping is coming on stronger and stronger. The prices are coming down and new systems are emerging every day. My best friend has an Objet Allaris as part of his tool arsenal. Most of these parts were printed on the big Zcorp machine, and others were printed in nylon on an SLS machine.
Laying out the UVs was the most time consuming part of this whole process. I grouped the different areas of my base model and unfolded them with UV Master. I shot them over to Maya via GoZ and laid the UVs out in a rectangle. That way I didn't have to try and warp the tread pattern to fit the original lay out ( I did use that method at some point, but the pattern had too much distortion in it ) By constraining the UVs into a rectangle, it reliably forced the tread texture to evenly "dive" in on itself. It is certainly nothing new, but for me, it was the best and fastest way to get there.
I used the new texture map to mask my model, and then used the inflate slider in the Deformation palette. There is always some noise and stretched polygons in the mesh after this process. I attacked that by first duplicating the mesh, switching to the duplicate, Dynameshing the model, and then reprojecting onto the original. My last step was just going over the whole thing with the H polish brush and chasing over the surface. I will knock together a little tutorial on this, if anyone would like to see it.
Man that's super stuff and great way to use zbrush! grats for the top row!!:tu::tu:
Great joker model and I bet Bridgestone are happy about the free advertising on the top row. :cool:
Excellent! Two of my favorite things, digital sculpting and football all in one:)
Great work and congrats!