Over a hundred years ago, Mercedes-Benz invented the first van, and today they are the world’s largest commercial vehicle manufacturer. Honoring this impressive history, MB and Element E Filmproduktion partnered with BOT VFX to showcase the impressive variety of tasks that Mercedes-Benz vans can do.
The commercial takes place in a very expansive setting filmed with multiple camera and drone angles. The clients needed set extension and CG enhancements to road, terrain, mountains and sky in 4K resolution.
Faced with this ambitious scope, the BOTs got busy creating a highly detailed 3D environment for this massive set extension:
- The CG department took the lead with creating the illusion of an enormous wide-open untouched space, adding elements for replacements of terrain, mountains, and sky. Even more challenging were the CG elements for recreating the road.
- The highly detailed texturing required to clean and extend the road while maintaining the plate details was just one of the complex tasks that the 3D department tackled, along with camera tracking and object tracking for both extreme close-ups and wide-angle shots.
- BOT’s compositing artists wrapped it up with a bow by creating the space using 2.5D camera projections, lighting, color correction, creating the tone, and stitching CG into the original plates.
The subtleties of the work done by BOT focus the advertisement clearly on the vans themselves. CG Supervisor Persie Jalgaonwala observed, “We created an environment that keeps attention on the vans. You don’t even see the VFX. Some of the best visual effects are happening when you don’t even notice that there are any visual effects.”
