Advertising with Lightwave and Vue 4 Professional

Pinball Off Road

With 8 years experience in advertising, Platinum Studio has produced marketing images for many of the world’s leading brands.

Let's take a look at one of their latest creations: Pinball Off Road.

Pinball Off Road

"Pinball Off Road" is the result of a financial ad for BBDO - Portugal. "[BBDO] explained to us the whole concept of the commercial idea and asked us if it was possible to be designed in 3D. The idea involved an Off Road pinball machine," said Flavio Albino, one of Platinum's lead artists.

Hit The Road!

The Platinum staff started by building a mock up made out of clay (in real-size scale), so they could study how they would distribute the lands and also the dynamics of the car.
After the mock up was approved by the contractor, the final picture was created using Vue 4 Professional, Lightwave and Photoshop. Here, we will take a further look at how the picture was created:

Starting From Scratch

From Scratch to Vue!

Platinum first started by creating the gound with Vue, and added different pieces of terrain as they went along.

Adding More Terrains!

To show the abililty for the SUV to wander anywhere, the Platinum team thought it was a good idea to mix many kinds of landscapes, such as himalayan-style mountains, arrid deserts, wild forests or even a volcano! Every one of these elements was created with Vue 4 Professional.

Himalayan Mounts

Himalayan Mounts Final Render

"I took more than 15 terrains to make this part of the scene! I can't imagine how long it would have taken me to prepare these using another tool!" said Flavio.

Every terrain was modeled separately, and then rendered in really high quality (3000*4000 pixels each). That way, it was easier to test each terrain and choose the ones that looked best.

Making The Volcano

Volcano Final Render

"Making the volcano was quite easy, thanks to Vue's easy-to-use terrain editor: all I had to do is create a convincingly carved mountain, add a cone with lava material and some smoke clouds on top of the crater."

Welcome To The Wild Side!

After adding all these new terrains to the final project, the next step was to scatter vegetation all over the scene.

Creating The Jungle

Jungle Final Render

"There are three types of environments in the scene: jungle, swamp and desert. Different plant species were selected to match each one of these environments. Of course, thanks to SolidGrowth, we could rapidly populate the scene with hundreds of different plants!"

Completing The Scene With 3D Models!

SUV Modeling In Lightwave

Tibetan Temple Final Model

The rest of the objects were modeled in Lightwave: the car, the bridge, the temple, then fence as well as all the elements of the Pinball machine...
(Can you locate the temple in the ad? This gives you an idea of the precision of the work of the team!)

Everything was then incorporated into the final scene. The final scene contained over 47 million poylgons!
The whole file was rendered on Macs (Dual 2GHz G5s with 4GB RAM and Dual 1GHz G4s with 1.5 GB RAM).
Finaly, the whole image was assembled and finalized in Photoshop. The final image was 3,6 GB large and took about 2 hours to process in Photoshop!

"We closed our studio to all others clients and after one month and a half of non-stop hard work (weekends included), many overnights, no sleep and we don't know for sure how many cold pizzas, we came up with this history of Pinball Off Road!"

What Is Platinum Studio?

Platinum Studio is an image design studio that has been working in the advertising and design industry since the mid 90's. The team counts 13 people, including designers, photographers, infographers and illustrators. Platinum's first steps in 3D were taken using LightWave 3 years ago. Platinum uses multiple techniques like photography (chemical or digital), 3D, and digital or traditional illustration. The team works an average of 12 hours a day!

Why Platinum Studio Prefers Vue 4 Professional:

"What's fantastic with Vue Pro is that it's an extremely powerful software, with a really fast renderer and superior quality, photo-realistic output. Vue Pro communicates well with the main 3D software on the market and it's very easy to work with. We never found another tool that could handle that many polygons so quickly; it's really impressive!"

Check out Platinum's web pages and portfolio here.