ADIDAS running shoes – product animations

Edit Template

ADIDAS running shoes – product animations

Edit Template

Setting the stage: environment building for product animations

One of my first assignments while working for Adidas Studio A, was to design and develop a template environment for Cinema 4D & Redshift in which other artists and myself would be able to stage various animations of prototype running shoes in.

As a reference for direction, I was shown an image depicting a dark room with several neon tubes hanging on nearly invisible strings from the ceiling. I expanded on that visual by creating visible light-sources, that, combined with some volumetric fog, provided the mysterious atmosphere my client wanted to achieve.

As a ground object, I designed a floating piece of asphalt road to visually underline the type of shoe, that had to be visualized first. Thanks to an easy to use and robust template, my colleagues and me where able to produce a couple of animations in a relatively short amount of time.

Above you can see a compilation of different visualizations produced in this context. Thanks to besserdrei for the edit and Jan Faszbender for the great sounddesign!

Changing the stage

Quite some time later, the company wanted another product visualization of that kind – only this time it was a newly designed soccer shoe that had to be presented. I was able to achieve a very satisfactory and congruent result by replacing the asphalt road with an earthy piece of ground, on which I scattered a few million instanced blades of grass.

Additional VFX in the post

For this presentation the client wished for additional visual highlighting of some unique features the product entailed. To meet this need I developed a visual effect, which could dynamically outline the parts that constitute these features and could be controlled in compositing.

This way we could try out different versions of the glow effect until satisfied – without the need to re-render every time.

The shoe models for these projects were designed in-house and provided as poly-data with a factory-ready amount of detail. After cleaning and organizing the geometry, once again Substance Painter went into action, to get these tasty materials.