Swisscom Vivo Tutto
- Role: 3D Camera Lead & CGI Supervisor
- CGI Team Size: 5 CGI Artists
- Core Tech: Houdini, Cinema 4D, V-Ray, Take4D CineBridge
Together with Tobi Fueter at stories AG, we expanded the idea of the Swisscom Liberty project of tiny people making our digital devices work. The idea was to travel from device to device, seeing their insides. For this, we had to create a camera path that would work with a motion control camera.
Core Challenge: Executing two distinct, complex television commercials from a single, continuous master camera movement, blending the macro world with the microscopic environments of the digital world.
As 3D Camera Lead, my primary responsibility was designing and engineering the highly complex, continuous camera trajectory that formed the backbone of this entire campaign. Because the creative concept relied on a seamless “single-take” aesthetic with zero visible edits, I chose Houdini to build and animate the camera path.
Richard Widgery from Take4D was responsible for programming the Milo motion control rig and making sure that it can accurately execute the move. With a custom script, Houdini helped me visualize speed and acceleration and stay within the limits of the rig. Precision was paramount because our digital camera path had to be perfectly translated into the physical world in varying scales, with massive ratios ranging from 1:33 up to 1:1000.
In my role as CGI Supervisor, I led a specialized 5-artist team responsible for bringing the microscopic electronic worlds to life. We utilized Cinema 4D as our primary 3D package to assemble, shade, and render. The Renderer we had chosen was V-Ray.
To approach true photorealism at microscopic scales, the project demanded very high-resolution textures. I took a hands-on approach to the texturing process, personally hand-painting hyper-detailed texture maps to ensure the CG scene looked entirely authentic when the camera passed mere millimeters away from them and integrated seamlessly with the built sets.
For the highly complex set-top box scene, the ideal camera trajectory mathematically required an impossible 100 meters of physical track and a 40-meter crane height. To overcome this, the camera paths were used in tandem with the on-set tracking systems to mathematically scale down and alter the physical rig’s movement on the fly, seamlessly preserving the intended visual perspective while generating automated tracking data. This allowed me to snap the final plates back into their correct layout in compositing.
As a bonus, the nature of the digital camera move and partially digital set allowed us to create a second commercial with reduced efforts.
