Real-time

LastMinute.com TV Ad

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/ About the project

In 2018 my team at MPC worked closely with Publicis, to create a brand new TV ad for LastMinute.com to release in early 2019.

Having introduced the pink flamingo as their brand mascot in a previous ad, the challenge was now how to create a new one, and many other videos for social and online platforms, without spending a fortune on traditional VFX pipelines to render out the feathery flamingo.

That's where I came in, leveraging my experience with real-time rendering and experimental workflows, to suggest we create the whole TV ad in Unreal Engine, which was well received by the agency due to results I'd previously achieved with ACE.

After a thorough R&D phase to create feathers in real-time, at a time when Unreal had no real support for hair or fur, we were able to create a great ad that delivered on the brief, plus a plethora of secondary videos, all within the budget.

/ CREDITS

Client:

LastMinute.com

Studio:

MPC

Agency:

Publicis

/ Year

2019

/ MORE INFO

We went through a painstaking R&D process to work out how we could create feathers for Unreal Engine, so our character would keep its charm and life.

The ideal solution ended up being Nvidia HairWorks, a framework to handle hair & fur which had an experimental integration in Unreal, and the naive idea that a feather could be created with a hair system, if we treated the rachis (stem) as a bone, and the vane (soft strands) as hair strands that would come out in only 2 directions - left and right.