TidyBuyer.com – 3D Animated Commercial

How we created a lovable 3d Mascot character ‘Bob’ and a 3D animated commercial for the launch of a new website service

Project: TidyBuyer Launch
Description: Creation of a 3D company mascot & 3d animated commercial plus artwork and designs for website
Clients: TidyBuyer

How it started

Sometime late last year, we were in early discussions with Steven Swan, CEO of tidyBuyer about making a simple little animation to help promote his new business. What started off as essentially a very basic cartoon with minimal animation and affects soon grew into a much bigger and complicated project as our discussions showed the many possibilities available when working with us to create a new 3D animated commercial which lead to a much more ambitious project being undertaken. After a face to face meeting and subsequent Skype video calls we both had a good idea of what we wanted to acheive and the message we needed to convey through the look and style and in particular the reaction we wanted viewers to get when they saw ‘Bob’ the main character in the video. From here our lead artist Gio began sketching some character concepts for Bob to develop his design and demeanor (seen below left).
Once the concept was signed off we moved onto modelling.

Building Bob

Once the concept design was approved, we then moved on to building the base model in Maya. As Bob had a very distinctive style, he had to be built from scratch as his head topology had to be simple and clean and his nose doesn’t have any notrils or other anatomical structure, just a simple clean design which required a bespoke mesh. Once the model was approved, he had to move onto the rigging phase which involves creating a hierachy of bones and controls through his body to deform him so that he can be posed and animated (see above right). A simple facial control system was made to aid in smooth facial transitions when his mood needed to flow according to the circumstances of the story. Some rough storyboards had been laid out around this point but on this project, our client was happy to let us have free reign from here as he felt completely safe in our hands as he had also asked for our help on refining teh design and look of the tidybuyer website as well. We created a large selection of images and banners to feature around the site as well as an animated flash banner for the homepage. Once we got the main site back on track, we returned to focussing on the animation work and starting bringing Bob to life.

Putting it all together

After roughly a months hard work getting all the shots animated and rendered out, we could move on to compositing and editing. The voice over previously recorded were a little too wordy for the final videos and had to be carefully edited to cut out uneccessary fluff that slowed the pace down. there are actually two versions of the video, a buyer version featured Bob, but also a seller video aimed at the suppliers who can also sign up on the website. An alternative version of Bob was created called Fred. Just a simple hair and tie change but as this was a last minute request from the client, it proved to be a bit more tricky than first anticipated. But as always we got it done, on budget and on time for our client.

The Result

Below you can watch the finished 3D animated commercial.