Nike™ and Bausch & Lomb™ have collaborated to bring a new product line into the sports arena. Athletes and recreational sports participants can now choose from two versions of a new soft contact lens designed to eliminate image distortion and improve field of vision. Nike MAXSIGHT™ comes in two tints, each giving the consumer a different set of capabilities for improving sight. The grey-green tint is for sports played in bright sunlight, where visual comfort is a concern, and the amber tint is for sports like tennis that require tracking a fast-moving ball. The lenses also come in both corrective and non-corrective versions.

MAXSIGHT enhances detail Image courtesy of The Ebeling Group

For athletes, the new lenses filter specific wavelengths of light to visually enhance elements such as a golf ball or tennis ball, filtering most of the blue light and changing the remaining colors of the visible spectrum to enhance critical details. These features of the Nike MAXSIGHT lens combine to provide visual benefits to athletes such as an enhanced view of the contours on an area of play, reduced bright sun glare and the ability to follow game activity under different light conditions. The recreational users benefit from less eye strain and issues associated with fogging, scratching or sweating behind plastic lenses of prescription sports goggles or glasses. Also no nosepiece or frame is present to limit the field of vision.

Athletes and recreational wearers can select between amber and grey-green lenses, depending upon their needs. Amber is best for fast-moving ball sports in variable light conditions (such as baseball, soccer and tennis), and the grey-green lens is ideal for sports played in bright sunlight where glare is a primary concern, (such as golf, running and rugby). Currently, Nike MAXSIGHT is the only commercially available sport-tinted contact lens on the market.

Nakd, a design company that is part of The Ebeling Group, has produced a state of the art 1 minute 30 second promo spot for Nike and Bausch & Lomb using CINEMA 4D™ that showcases the new MAXSIGHT lenses. With live-action and animated work for clients like Adidas™, Nike, Japan Railways™, and TBS™ , as well as a significant body of print work and innovative internal projects including music videos, the principle held by Nakd designers and animators is uncomplicated - be innovative.

Chris Bahry, art director on the MAXSIGHT promo, has always been interested in computer graphics. While he studied biology, linguistics and literature in college, his view was to enter the field of medical illustration and technical/scientific illustration. Upon leaving school, Chris joined Bruce Mau Design Inc. located in Toronto. It was a multi-disciplinary work environment where they worked closely with architects and designers. Their work centered around design and production of various exhibitions, books and magazines, textile patterns, and identity / branding projects. This provided Chris with a good solid atmosphere in which to "cut his teeth" in the business.

At that time, Chris was using a Mac® and he stated, "It was pre-Maya® and XSI® and all that was really available for someone trying to find their way on their own was Lightwave™. I first found my way with CINEMA 4D using an early version, however after version 6 came out I really delved much more deeply into it. It was extremely accessible. With it I was able to finally do some things that I had wanted to do for a long time."

Toward the end of Chris' stay with Bruce Mau Design Inc., he was contracted to do animated material for a documentary feature. Using his vacation time, he completed the job and it was then that he knew this was definitely the type of work that he wanted to do. A few months later he was contacted by The Ebeling Group who had just opened a shop in Toronto and they invited Chris to join them. Nakd, the design team that was formed, now works under the umbrella of The Ebeling Group exclusively. The Ebeling Group, a Los Angeles and New York based Production Company represents world class leading design and directing collectives mk12, Nakd, Lobo, Tenant, Casky, bitstate and Convert. These design entities are world-renowned within the modern design and animation community and consistently set the standard for motion design and animation as an art form. Even though the Nakd design group can develop all aspects of CG material, they prefer to concentrate on a more realistic 3D look and feel.

MAXSIGHT filters out glare Image courtesy of The Ebeling Group

Chris explains, "Each studio in The Ebeling Group seems to specialize. Some concentrate on motion graphics, some in 3D, etc. At Nakd, we really enjoy producing photorealistic 3D work with really beautiful lighting and materials, but that is fundamentally design and art-driven. A sort of stylized or hyper-realistic look and feel."

Among Nakd's recent work is an animated short for Adidas™ as well as "Pemmikan" for which Nakd was selected to be in the Cannes International advertising Festival's annual "Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase".

They were approached around mid December of 2005 concerning producing an animated promo for the new MAXSIGHT lens from Nike. The promo includes animation as well as live action shots at the beginning and end of the promo. Chris stated, "We worked directly with the people at Nike. There was a live action component at the beginning and the end of the piece as well as animation. We designed the boards and traveled out to Portland to direct the live action shots along with others we brought onboard to do the photography. It was a pretty straight forward shoot. We were specifically looking to get the clean, simple frames that ended up in the final shoot. At the beginning of the piece where you have the push into the eye… it's in a 3D world of the eyeball. Photographically, it was a very tricky thing to pull off because we had someone behind the camera pulling the focus and there was also a person pulling the camera on a track toward the actor shooting the video which involved a dolly and a zoom. Those two elements had to coordinate perfectly."

Animation and Light - Elements of Design Image courtesy of The Ebeling Group

Time was of the essence with an approximate 2 ½ week turnaround and that meant that everything had to work smoothly and work well. The promo was animated and largely modeled in CINEMA 4D. Some modeling was also done in Autodesk® 3ds Max® with the scenes being imported back and forth between the two software packages. Chris appreciates the ease of moving scenes back and forth between CINEMA 4D and other software which greatly aids in the work pipeline.

Chris explains, "That's one of the really big advantages of CINEMA 4D. I've found that on quite a few jobs we're moving models in and out and it has not been a problem and hasn't been for a long time. That's always been important and it's kind of the Holy Grail when working with different 3D software. On other jobs we've had a lot of success in moving data around and back and forth using FBX® as well as camera and animation settings. On the MAXSIGHT promo I was animating day and night and there were still bits and pieces that needed to be cut. We had a freelancer at the time working with us and he was a Lightwave user. It was pretty awesome how we were able to import all aspects of the Lightwave files into CINEMA 4D without a problem. The hierarchies are preserved very effectively and that was pretty much a lifesaver. When it came down to the wire, it would have been a trick to pull it off otherwise just because of the time constraints. However, having that available to us in CINEMA 4D was really exceptional."

Nakd works with the latest version of CINEMA 4D, R9.603 and also has all of the modules including MoGraph which they are already using in projects. Chris feels that MoGraph takes the place of a very complicated particle system setup. He can easily create things that under other circumstances would be extremely difficult to set up. Chris stated, "The first day I installed and opened the module, I looked at the manual for about 10-15 minutes and then I created a 10 second animation. For someone who knows the software, MoGraph is extremely simple to use. I think even for someone coming from another application, it would be quite easy to pick up."

Different elements of the project called for specialized methods to accurately show the detail that Nakd is known for in their work. For example, in one scene of the promo you will see the ball pass behind the lens. When the ball is in front of the lens, you will see a bit more glare and less saturation depicting what the athlete sees on a normally sunny day.

The MAXSIGHT lenses Image courtesy of The Ebeling Group

Showing the difference Image courtesy of The Ebeling Group

After the ball passes behind the MAXSIGHT lens, there is much more clarity and the glare is absent showing how the lens filters out the sunlight effects while improving clarity. Chris assigned different compositing tags to each of the objects which allowed for the creation of alpha channels in multipass rendering. This gave him the control that he wanted in his compositing application. They applied a simple Fresnel to the lens object in the diffusion channel which enabled the material to have a different look depending upon each angle of view.

The rendering was done at high resolution because they wanted to make sure that they had a very clean crisp look. They rendered at least a little bit over resolution at 960x720 , a 4:3 aspect ratio, which would be a somewhat larger frame size.

That size added resolution so that when they ultimately brought things down to 720x540 for output to D1, which is standard resolution, it really made a difference. They had only one day allotted for rendering hundreds of frames with many passes and things had to go through the pipeline very quickly. In addition, the last scene with the tennis balls used the HAIR module to create the fuzz on the ball. Chris remembers "We did a multi-pass render with the HAIR render buffer including all of the components. We included the different shadow layers and back layers, the front lighting, etc. The balls had to look realistic and we achieved that with the HAIR module along with other aspects of CINEMA 4D. We also had to bring the render time down to around 10 minutes per frame and everything had to look perfect with the lighting, the fuzz on the balls, etc. We devised a method to make the shots actually not lit in the conventional way. The lighting and the ambient lighting were all baked in by baking an occlusion map for all of the objects."

Realism achieved with the soccer ball Image courtesy of The Ebeling Group

Another aspect of the scene to be considered involved the reflection on the soccer ball. Instead of rendering with GI, he used the bake function which drastically cut down on render time yet still allowed them to create the wonderful glossy reflections on the soccer ball.

Instead of relying on specular highlights coming from omni lights and area lights, all of the highlights were actually real reflections and real glossy reflections. This really enhanced the realism. It's a method that is becoming a little bit more common now. In producing a really glossy reflection, instead of using phong or a blinn, you can use this method. The render times would have been astronomical if it were GI or area shadows. Some of the frames were 3 to 4 minute renders but they achieved photorealism almost right out of the box.

Setting up the materials for reflection Image courtesy of The Ebeling Grou

Nakd has garnered quite a bit of attention in Europe since the Cannes Film Festival and they are seeking out more commercial work there as well as other projects in the United States. They are concentrating on working with The Ebeling Group to bring something new to the table and they enjoy working in collaboration with an agency rather than just getting a finished script and executing the work. Their course of action is to work as collaborators with an agency as well as often working directly with the client. Above all else they strive to bring things that are new and fresh to the table. They are also always looking to bring in new talent in the form of freelancers to increase their creative pool. Chris says, "The more artists in the creative pool that you have in a room together, the more likely you are to have something really astonishing develop. We're not just looking for a lighting artist, an animator or some type of a specialist. We are looking for someone who's not only well versed in all aspects of 3D production, but someone who is well rounded. We're looking for someone who might have an interest in photography, or graphic design and who knows how to put together a storyboard on paper. Those things are all a big part of what we do. We're always looking for someone who has diverse specialties. It's a challenge for sure, but there are people like that more and more now."

Along those same lines, Chris had some advice for up and coming artists looking to get into the design field. "In order to be a successful graphic designer and 3D artist, you have to know a lot about photography, how a camera works, what cinematography is all about, how to create a scene and how to put together a story. You are also going to have to write as well as know how to express yourself verbally so it's always good to have verbal skills. Bottom line, you really need to know your software."

The new MAXSIGHT lenses Image courtesy of The Ebeling Group

"However, the software and learning where the buttons are…these are just your tools. But everything else that you bring to the table determines the quality of your ideas, your originality and your concepts. You can't produce a quality scene by just modeling something and adding a light. It's a great time in the industry. A lot of development is happening. In the 3D software area, there is huge activity going on with all fields active, vibrant and alive. I was at SIGGRAPH and you get a very clear sense of that there. I think that in the next 10 years and with the younger generation that are more skilled and more intelligent coming up… that's probably where it lies. I'm really excited to see that happen. We'll see how it will fall. Along those lines and showing how acceptable things have become in more recent years, there has been a flourishing of smaller studios and individuals creating work. While we're not a huge facility, it's not necessary anymore. You can have 10 people and create amazing work that is right up there with the veterans from the best studios in the world. Also the online communities like CGChannel and CGSociety with all of those artists sharing techniques and pooling their ideas and even their work…those online communities are fueling a lot of what is going on now."

I feel that you will find the MAXSIGHT promo is a terrific example of realism mixed with animation to produce an outstanding representation of not only the new lens from Nike, but an example of how well CINEMA 4D is now being used in the design industry to produce excellent realistic material for clients across the board. I look forward to seeing more of Nakd and The Ebeling Group's work.

You can view the terrific Nike/Bausch & Lomb MAXSIGHT lens promo here and visit Nakd on The Ebeling Group website by clicking on "Directors" and then "nakd".

Story by Kathie Berry
Websites: http://www.berry-designs.com
http://www.planit3d.com
Email: kathie@berry-designs.com

Copyright 2006, PlanIt 3D