You wouldn't necessarily expect a vacuum-cleaner spot to be an incubator for cutting-edge commercial technique. But think about it – a vacuum-cleaner commercial isn't selling a vacuum cleaner so much as it's selling a spotless living environment. For a Eureka spot commissioned by the Doner agency, Blur Studio's design department and its 3D department worked together to show a photoreal, all-CG house being swept clean by the new Capture vacuum model. As Blur CG Supervisor Adam Swaab explained to us, the challenge wasn't so much in creating a virtual environment as it was in making the spot play – figuring out some angles and crazy camera moves to propel the spot from point to point. Watch the spot, then read the Q&A below.

Is it common for you to do an all-CG environment?
We do a lot of "CG environments." We don’t do a lot of photoreal CG environments. I’ve been here for three years, and this isn’t typical for us. We couldn’t have shot live action at all. With the things we were doing with the camera and all these intricate transitions, it would have been a logistical nightmare. We had lots of flexibility, too, with changing things around. Keeping this in a computer environment was probably necessary.

So doing this in CG was one of the first creative decisions made?
That was the reason they came to us. We were working with Doner in New York. Part of our pitch was to convince them we could do this as a CG spot. I wouldn’t say they were skeptical, but they wanted to see that we could do a photorealistic carpet. And making the vacuum look real was incredibly important.

Did you show them tests?
We had stills of some of the carpet scenes. We had test animations of the vacuum cleaner to show part of the feel we thought would be appropriate for the spot. The idea for the tests was to keep it lively and make the vacuum like a character. It was much more lively in the initial pitch animation. We toned stuff down because when you get onto TV, it’s important that you get a really good look at the vacuum, not that it’s moving around constantly. We were working with CAD models they had provided for the initial pitch. When we got into our production we rebuilt the models.

The CAD models were probably much more detailed than you needed.
Yes. That’s why we had to rebuild them. To do stills is not a problem, but animating them was just not going to happen.

What was the pre-vis process like?
It was a long process in the animatic phase. We really did try a lot of different ways of getting from one scene to another scene. In general we were working with really low-res models. We were working with a script so we knew where to start and what points to hit, and there was an animatic from the client that gave us some direction. The rest was just figuring out fun ways to get from one place to another and keep the flow moving. Probably the most difficult thing was trying to accomplish this in a seamless way, making a 30-second spot with no cuts in it. You get half of the spot working correct, and then the rest you have to fine-tune, and blending them together is probably the toughest part.

Did you use the same package from start to finish for both animatics and the actual animation?
Yes. We used 3ds max.

What was the workflow like?
There was a design team headed by Norn Kittiaksorn. She was especially important, since she went and researched the kind of couch, the kind of carpet, the doors she wanted. She did all of that. We had one person building the models for the vacuum cleaner. We had one person who built the room environment at the end, and he also built all the carpeting and the steps. And then we had one other person working on the fan scene as well.

What were the specific challenges?
The biggest challenge in terms of addressing client notes was actually the carpet. It was the attempt to get it fluffy enough. It was more of a look. We ended up using, rather than a hair simulation or rendering fibers, we ended up using displacement. The carpet was rendered out of [Chaos Group] V-Ray, and it uses V-Ray materials. A lot of the look of the carpet is done in post. We did a lot of color-correction and brought up all of the shadows. If you look at the carpet there are really no dark shadows in it. That made it look a lot fluffier. We overlaid some blurs and simulated light scattering through the carpet, and a lot of that was done in post.

Did you build the carpet from scratch, or use photographs to create textures?
We did a photo shoot. We got a bunch of different carpet samples and did a texture shoot and chose the one that worked the best for us.

It’s interesting, because when you think about it, that’s what you’re selling here – not so much a vacuum cleaner as a really clean carpet.
The other thing that was challenging with the environment was making it so clean and perfect working. Part of what makes things real – if you look at your walls, there’s a little bit of scuffing. It happens everywhere. It’s one of those little details that makes things look real. Here we had to struggle against that. You don’t want to see a vacuum cleaning a room where the wall has little scuffs on it. It was a challenge to get something super-clean that you could still buy as real.

How about the final shot of the room, with the sunlight coming through the windows. Was that out of the ordinary at all?
No, I don’t think so. The background image, I believe, is an HDRI image, and the light that’s shining through is just a regular light. The HDRI image gives us a really nice tonal range. The last scene is rendered with global illumination as well, so you’re really seeing light bouncing around the room and filling in the shadows and cracks.

Is there anything you're particularly proud of in this spot?
The thing I’m proudest of is overcoming the logistics. We go from one environment to another to another to another all within two camera moves. The hardest part was accomplishing that and putting it all together in a way that worked. We were using two different renderers, as well, where all the environment stuff was rendered out of V-Ray and the vacuum was rendered out of [SplutterFish] Brazil. I didn’t do the rendering on the last scene, but I think what we did was bake a reflection map of the V-Ray environment to use with the vacuum cleaner, and then of course we composited ground shadows onto the final comp.