Tik Tok

Tik Tok TV Commercial! You’d probably be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t heard of Tik Tok at this point, but we’ll take any excuse for some Cinema 4D fun. In keeping with Tik Tok’s short-form, rapid-fire style, this ad was packed with loads of variety relative to its short runtime.

The Concept

The aim was to take the 9×16 edit and surround it with cool graphics to fill in the rest of the 16×9 frame. The graphics had to complement and amplify what we were seeing in the live action content. Plus Tik Tok is all about the transitions, so it was key that the whole edit flowed really smoothly, even when jumping between very different styles and concepts.

The Animation

The eagle eyed among you will have noticed that this bubble animation didn’t make the final cut. Due to the edit we were working to being updated constantly a lot of our graphics ended up falling by the wayside, but since all of the individual clips were so short this didn’t end up losing us a lot of time. What it did do though was allow us to experiment with a load of fun ideas in a really small timescale, almost like the daily renders a lot of VFX artists do to keep the creativity flowing. We’ll never complain about getting to test out new simulation or texturing techniques!

What really tied this bubble scene together, apart from the satisfyingly jiggly soft body dynamics, was using the video layer as an HDRI environment. This meant we could get the reflections and refractions across bubbles that in reality would be at the wrong angle to pick up any light from the video in the centre.

It wasn’t just 3D though, this Breaking Bad inspired periodic table animation is just good old fashioned After Effects. Maybe 2.5D is more accurate, as the depth of field effect on the more distant elements does a lot of the heavy lifting in making this effect look really premium.

This last shot is a great example of how well Octane and Quixel Megascans work together. The super high quality models and textures from Megascans are only enhanced by Octane’s physically based rendering (which basically just means Octane tries to simulate how light really moves and bounces while rendering).

A job well done!

All in all, really happy with the result, and the team at Mother London were fantastic to work with. Good producers are always key in projects like this where things are always in flux, somebody needs to be able to keep track of everything while we’ve got our heads down animating!