The Mill create CG 'grab' of crabs for Volvo ad

Oscar winning facility The Mill recently completed work on the latest Volvo commercial for the sports saloon S60 model.
The 3D department used their expertise to create and render large CG crowds of red-crabs. Directed by Laszlo Kadar at Blink for agency MVBMS Fuel Europe, the spot hit television screens in the UK at the end of February.
The commercial is set on Christmas Island, where at a particular time of year the island's red-crabs migrate from the hills to the sea, so that they can mate and lay their eggs. As the Volvo drives around the island, a river of hundreds of crabs are crossing the road in front of the car, on their way to the beach. The driver spots a gap and steers to the right. Simultaneously the crabs guess wrong and run the same way. The approaching car swings back the other way just as the crabs sprint back again. As the inevitable is about to happen the driver effortlessly steers a path through and over the creatures, without touching any of them and the caption appears "The point at which a sports saloon becomes a Volvo".
The Mill's 3D department set about re-creating all the crabs in CG. The 3D team were sent a cast of a real red-crab from Sydney University, which was laser scanned as a basis for the CG model. High-resolution photographs were used as a starting point to create the texture-maps for the CG crabs.
To animate all the crabs individually would have taken a great deal of time
so an "intelligent crab" was created by Wayde Duncan-Smith using MEL (Maya Embedded Language) software. It automated the movement of its eight legs, body and pincers with random variations dependent on speed, orientation and position. This crab was then duplicated hundreds of times and control passed on to flocking software created in-house by Laurent Kermel, which allowed the team to control the variation of movement and behaviour of a huge crowd of crabs.
When the 3D work was completed, Mill Flame artist Judy Roberts began the work of compositing in the crabs. She concentrated on grading and lighting the creatures, so that they would fit seamlessly into the live action footage. Additional work included painting out the tracker markers and cones that were used for the car shoot and also the reflections of the cones on the car.
The Mill, www.mill.co.uk
(GB)