Wave Chocolate Brand & Commercial Design
Wave Chocolate is a fictional chocolate brand that I made to stretch my legs and refresh with some of the 2D design work that I have done in the past while giving myself an opportunity to experiment with creating a chocolate commercial in Houdini. For Wave Chocolate, I have designed four separate effects shots so far as practice with FLIP fluids and other parts of Houdini. I hope to have an opportunity to show off my skills with a real brand eventually, but for the time being I hope you have fun seeing what I have done with my own chocolate!
What is Wave Chocolate?
Wave Chocolate is a luxury brand milk chocolate bar with caramel designed for those with an active lifestyle and imagery related to beaches. That is what I came up with back when I designed the brand, in order to practice fluid simulations and have it be justified. If the chocolate is called “Wave” of course I’ll have waves! The colors are meant to evoke a sunrise over a beach with the different blues / browns. I make sure to keep the “sun” shape always at the top of my shot so that it can remain as a “sun” in the sky.
I already knew a few of the shots that I wanted to do, and figured that a logo design that could directly contribute to the bar’s shape would be appropriate. I had run some tests using a Hershey’s bar shape, but wanted a bar that could contain caramel so that I could integrate different liquids into shots. I’ve never been a big fan of caramel myself, but I think that it looks really appetizing, so I decided to let my personal feelings go with that decision.
One of my friends brought up sea salt caramel to me recently, and I honestly never knew that existed. Now that I do, I can’t help but feel that I’ll return to this project again to improve my fictitious chocolate brand.
Shot #1: Wave of Chocolate
The “commercial” starts with a wave of chocolate that spreads over a mold of the designs of Wave Chocolate bars. I use FLIP fluids for this shot with a deforming emitter offscreen to give variations in the wave to keep it visually interesting even after the chocolate starts to settle halfway through the shot.
I used VDB’s to create the mold and added the brand colors with some masking. I “flipped” the way that the molds would be in order to keep the “WAVE” text readable to the camera, even though a proper mold would be backwards. It’s important to me that the brand is recognizable in each shot, and having the logo backwards would be unacceptable. I adjusted the mold shape, viscosity, and gravity until I got the liquid behavior that I was happy with.
This was rendered with Redshift and was made with a lot of large area lights to try and avoid harsh shadows. The chocolate has SSS, and I worked on tweaking the chocolate material a lot with smoothed points and normals in order to get a good quality that looked nice up close.
Shot #2: Chocolate Rises to Surface
This shot was created using primarily VDB’s to combine a chocolate “surface” with the bar design. A ripple solver and heavy keyframes were used to deform the grid to create a basic ripple, and the chocolate bar was hand animated in order to get the exact bobbing behavior I wanted while keeping the brand front and center. There are no “fluid simulations” in this shot, and the basic chocolate motion was done using surface noise on a deformed grid that is animated slightly to give the illusion of the chocolate flowing from the top left to bottom right.
The chocolate starts to “dry off” as the VDB smoothing I added starts to go away. I add a material blending effect to make the chocolate that is higher up look like it is “blending” into solidified chocolate with a different reflectivity and color. This height limit changes throughout the shot to accommodate the first “bob” out of the liquid and the full rising differently with different thresholds.
Shot #3: Caramel Drizzle
By far my favorite shot, I used a FLIP Fluid simulation with variable viscosity in order to get this effect. Similarly to Shot #2, I used material blending based on attributes in order to get the color to change as the caramel “cools off”. This caramel behavior is not what you would actually expect from caramel solidifying, as the viscosity should actually go up rather than down, but this behavior was chosen for its visual appeal rather than realism, as many commercials do.
The chocolate is “drying off” on a fancy beach towel that I made using some vellum and surface noise. I kept the beach towel fairly simple and tried to avoid having smaller fibers coming off of it because I considered those to be unappetizing to think about fibers getting into your chocolate / caramel. The beach towel sports the brand colors and I believe looks fairly good. I believe that I hit a good middle ground between realism and stylization on this shot, and it was fun experimenting with what “should” happen and what “looks” best!
Shot #4: Packaging the Bar
In the final shot (at least for now), I package the chocolate bar using Vellum. I made a wrapper that “seals” up as it spins around. I found that the best way to do this was switching out the geometry for a “sealed” package in order to avoid self-intersections with vellum. I animated both versions of the package, and hide the transition using motion blur between the two. I transfer the UVs by position in order to make the surfacing for the two bars the same, despite topology differences.
With rendering this shot, I wanted to add something fantastical to “justify” why this package was not just on the ground. I ended up going with some small orange particles to reinforce the idea of a sun / sunset and have them swirl around as the package swirls to give the illusion that the particles are being “blown away” when the package twists around. I really just had a lot of fun working in Redshift with some of the bloom, and am fairly happy with the results although I hope to revisit the vellum soon to get the wrinkles just right.