Based in Sheffield, UK, Ark VFX hit the ground running in 2003 with their first music video for Muse's Sing for Absolution, put together entirely with LightWave and Fusion (watch the making of). Since then they've created work ranging from an animated bacon man to a whole World Cup campaign for Adidas, gaining a reputation for pulling off the impossible jobs that many bigger studios have baulked at. But the latest Cocopops adverts sticks in the minds of the artists because of the way "LightWave helped to achieve something that Renderman for Maya, even with a new build written especially for them by Pixar, could not", said Patrick Ward from Ark VFX.
Who are Ark and how long have you been using LightWave?
We’ve been using LightWave since version 4. Before Ark was formed, we'd all known and worked with each other for well over a decade in Particle Systems, an award winning game developer also based in Sheffield. LightWave had been the core tool for Particle Systems from the beginning and was used throughout the company’s history even as more use was made of Max and Maya. Most of us at Ark are LightWave generalists at heart and I think it’s the deceptive simplicity that endears it to us. It’s very immediate and easy to use and you can achieve broadcast quality results relatively easily.
How did you get the Kellogg's project?
To be honest we very nearly didn't. Kellogg’s had changed their advertising agency and naturally the agency had their own preferred creative teams. Kellogg’s however appreciated just how much Ark had been responsible for the success of their previous campaigns and so insisted we were given first shot. The agency sent us their brief for a bucking bronco puppet boy racing over a landscape of morphing cocopops and we jumped into it.
Was LightWave you first choice?
Erm, no. Our pipeline is quite fluid and we naturally have different approaches and solutions for each project. To tie yourself down to one package for every job would be foolish and while we're only a small team we have experience in many different areas and choose the right tool for the job. However, during the R&D we were angling towards using Maya and Renderman as we knew that Maya’s instancing and Renderman’s cheap displacement would make it relatively straightforward.
We were about 40% of the way through the R&D when we found a problem which, unusually, we couldn't solve or find a work around for. Renderman for Maya simply couldn't render the Cocopops instances in any usable amount of time. We struggled with this for a while until we had to contact Pixar directly. They couldn't suggest anything and eventually they did us the honour of writing us our very own build of RfM in the hope of fixing it. But it didn't work and we needed another option.
At the time another part of the team was working on a quick job for Jameson’s Whiskey that required creatures and spaceships to be made from millions of chairs, crashing around city streets. They had gone down the entirely LightWave route, using HD_Instance for the chairs. This seemed a viable alternative. We could still do all the animation and setup in Maya and the final rendering in LightWave.
