We’re thrilled to see how the newest commercial for Cheerios finally turned out. Joel Gerlach and Cobalt Cox, from Studio 229 in LA, created the spot in Blender having to deliver a bold, yet exciting brief: ‘Create Cheeriocraft, Minecraft, but with Cheerios’.
It took the team at Studio 229 only 3 weeks to create the whole world, character, user interface and animation for the 30 seconds commercial. And just a few hours more to complete the rendering on our servers. This is the final cut, which is now screening on TV:
Joel talks about the comings of ‘Cheeriocraft’ in his guest post on BlenderNation:
“To start, Cobalt built the entire island using an image texture to drive the island’s geometry. He then used a Remesh modifier to turn the generated mesh into cubes. A particle system was then used to populate the cubed lanscape with linked assets, mostly Cheerios. Different particle systems were used for each different terrain type. Using the same island geometry we added in particle systems located in specific areas that would drive objects like trees, cacti and flowers. We really took advantage of Blender’s linked libraries and proxies so that we could update assets at any time and they’d populate throughout every shot with no re-importing needed.
The timelapse castle build was a pretty challenging thing to animate as well, due to the complexity of the castle mesh itself. We finally landed on a system of keyframing the linked group’s visibility in the outliner. Cobalt built different stages of ‘completion levels’ on each modular section of the castle, which I then keyframed on and off in sequence to create the illusion of cheerios being added in a timelapse fashion. Took a bit of trial and error to get to that point!”
It was a delight to work so professionally with Joel, and we hope to see many projects come together like this. You can get a sense of the vibe these guys put in their work by watching the making of their logo, wrapped up in an animation sequence called Metropolis (inspired by Frits Lang 1929 epic movie):
