The trio Rocky Morton, Legacy Effects and Eight VFX striked again. They already worked together to produce the Carls Jr robot campaign, where Eight VFX was nominated at the VES Awards 2012 for Outstanding Animated Character in a Broadcast Program or Commercial (link to Carls Jr Robot making of).

Rocky Morton's choice was to keep going with his winning formula : mixing a real character designed by Legacy Effects with a digital version created by Eight VFX on a per shot basis to get the best of both worlds. On his side, Eight VFX trusted again photogrammetry and more specifically the Enwaii pipeline for accurate digital double reconstruction.

Zicam commercial explains that "you don't catch a cold, a cold catches you". The Cold Monster was designed to embody the "pre-cold" hunting his prey. By taking Zicam at the first signs of the cold, it is possible to defeat the monster.

Most of the commercial was shot with the practical monster, but when the monster is sneezing, having a digital character leaves room for subtle expressions on his face, a challenge hard to achieve with a practical suit. Eight VFX was provided by Legacy Effects the concept mesh the studio used to design the actual monster. This mesh had to be reshaped, textured and rigged to get a photorealistic animated character.

In order to get a mesh with a topology easy to rig, Eight VFX artists combined Enwaii for photogrammetry with NEX for retopology, both available directly in Maya. Mathias Jourdes took photos of the actual monster face and used the Enwasculpt plugin (part of Enwaii) to reshape exactly the retopologized mesh to match the photos. This way it was possible for the studio to get a face both easier to rig and to texture.

With the mesh and photos lining perfectly, Mathias exported his work to Mudbox to texture the monster's face and get an accurate map. Once the texturing done, the modeling was even pushed further by adding details like exact lips shape and spots on the skin. This job illustrates that having a photogrammetry pipeline like Enwaii gives more flexibility to the artist than a regular standalone photogrammetry program.

Enwaii with Mudbox