In “Protest,” a new spot that The Mill New York cre-ated with agency TBWA\Chiat\Day to advertise the Absolut® brand, thousands of protestors and riot po-lice engage in a colossal battle—fought not with the traditional weaponry of guns, bombs, and missiles but, rather, with a playful substitute meant to evoke the innocence of childhood: pillows.

The 60-second spot, which debuted in May, is one of three amusing commercials the studio created as part of a global campaign entitled “In an Absolut World.” To create a crucial scene in the commercial, the studio relied on Maya® nCloth, one of the many cutting-edge features in version 8.5 of Autodesk® Maya® software.

“Staying up-to-date with the latest technology is the key to remaining competitive in visual effects,” says Asher Edwards, the studio’s 3D operations manager. “We consider nCloth to be the most up-to-date tool for creating realistic cloth. By using nCloth on this commercial, we created a better-looking effect in less time than we would have if we used traditional cloth animation techniques.”

In the commercial, a squadron of CG aircraft flies toward a crowd of thousands of protestors and riot police. Each plane is carrying a net bulging with 12 CG pillows. As the planes approach the crowd, the nets release the pillows, which collide with each other as they fall to the ground like feather-filled bombs. A riot then ensues, as protestors and police face off in a massive pillow fight.

The Mill’s 3D team, led by CG artist Ben Smith, created a variety of complex effects for the com-mercial—among them transforming 500 extras into thousands of people; creating the feathers that ex-plode from the pillows during the fight; and building the CG planes that drop the pillows onto the crowd. Although each effect is impressive in its own right, Edwards notes that the process the team followed to create the CG pillows represents a major milestone in the world of 3D cloth simulation.

“The key to pulling off this particular effect was to make the pillows deform and collide with each other realistically, both while they’re in the net and while they’re falling through the air. Traditionally, to do this in CG requires that you create a mix of soft body and rigid body dynamics, which are very hard to calcu-late,” he says. “You also have to cheat a lot; perform a lot of under-the-hood tricks to give the illusion of cloth simulation.

“But Maya 8.5 and nCloth do these complex calcula-tions for you, creating the collision effect quickly and automatically,” he adds. “And the result is photo-realistic, making nCloth a necessary tool for cloth simulation.”

Released earlier this year, Maya 8.5 marks the first installment of Maya® Nucleus, Autodesk’s next-generation unified simulation framework. Maya Nucleus is a linked particle system that interactively simulates a variety of dynamic entities and works with various geometry types. Maya nCloth, the first module built on the Maya Nucleus technology, enables artists to direct and control cloth and other

Pillow Talk

The Mill New York creates an Absolut Protest using Maya nCloth and Autodesk Flame.

The Mill New YorkCustomer Success Story

By Audrey Doyle

Autodesk® Maya® nClothAutodesk® Flame

Maya 8.5 and nCloth do these complex calculations for you, creating the collision effect quickly and automatically. And the result is photorealistic, making nCloth a necessary tool for cloth simulation.—Asher Edwards

3D Operations Manager TBWA\Chiat\Day

Image courtesy of The Mill.

material simulations quickly and easily. Maya nCloth objects can be as stiff, viscous, or flowing and as tightly or loosely woven as desired. In addition, artists can rapidly create cloth-on-cloth simulations, such as a shirt over a pair of pants, with realistic influences and collisions, as well as bend, stretch, shear, dent, and tear nCloth fabrics.

In addition to these features, Maya nCloth boasts a unique air-pressure model that enables artists to use any geometry—whether closed, sealed volumes such as inner tubes, or open volumes such as the pillows in this spot—to create inflatable objects with internal and external pressure. According to Edwards, for the Absolut commercial The Mill artists relied on this air-pressure model to give the pillows volume, lending further realism to the simulation.

“It was important that the pillows keep their volume throughout the effect, and nCloth did that for us,” he says. “We haven’t had this capability in any other software before. Without this feature, again we would have had to cheat by adjusting the volume visually, instead of calculating it dynamically.”

Also lending realism to the effect was the artists’ abil-ity to assign a Maya Nucleus calculation to each wing of the four CG planes, for a total of eight separate calculations. By assigning a calculation to each wing, the artists could simulate different amounts of grav-ity “pulling” the CG pillows to the ground, so that the pillows didn’t all fall at the same rate.

“We could apply a higher amount of gravity on one wing than another, on one plane than the others, and so on, so that the pillows would fall at different speeds,” Edwards says. “Because the pillows had their own ‘worlds’ to calculate their simulations, the result looked more realistic than it would have if we had done the calculations ourselves.”

In addition to Maya nCloth, the artists also relied heavily on Autodesk® Flame® compositing and ef-

fects software for a majority of the pillow-fight scene. In particular, they used a mixture of live-action plates composited together to create the illusion that far more people were in the scene than actually were.

“Flame is highly interactive and fast, and it gave us a considerable amount of control [in this spot],” notes Angus Kneale, senior compositor at The Mill. According to Kneale, on some shots the artists com-posited 60–70 high-definition (HD) layers in Flame. In addition, he says that the system’s array of effects tools, including warping, morphing, color correction, tracking and stabilization, and paint, were indispens-able. “The great thing about Flame is that all the tools work together within a homogeneous environment,” he says. “It is a real help that we don’t have to exit and use another package [to have access to these tools]. Everything is in one environment.”

According to Edwards, “Protest” was the first proj-ect in which the artists used nCloth, and everyone, including the agency and the client, was pleased with the result. Down the road, he envisions using

Autodesk, Flame, and Maya are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc./Autodesk Canada Co. in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders. Autodesk reserves the right to alter product offerings and speci-fications at any time without notice, and is not responsible for typographical or graphical errors that may appear in this document.

© 2007 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.

nCloth for other effects as well. “Of course, any-thing CG character-related would benefit in terms of clothing, but we also did a test with a CG sailboat, and we used Maya and nCloth to animate the sail. Plus, I heard about some people using the air-pres-sure feature in nCloth to simulate muscles. The possibilities are endless.”

For this project, however, it’s clear that nCloth was the key to helping the team create the pillows. “It would have been next to impossible to create the same environment with existing simulation sys-tems,” says Smith. “It could have been done by hand, but it would have taken five times as long and it wouldn’t have been of the same quality as the nCloth simulations. nCloth is easy to set up, very fast, and extremely flexible to manage, and we are just using endemic Maya controllers.”

“nCloth is a unique piece of cloth software that’s at the cutting edge for cloth simulation,” Edwards concludes. “It’s a fantastic addition to the Autodesk software lineup.”

nCloth is a unique piece of cloth software that’s at the cutting edge for cloth simulation. It’s a fantastic addition to the Autodesk software lineup.—Asher Edwards

3D Operations Manager TBWA\Chiat\Day

Image courtesy of The Mill.

Image courtesy of The Mill.