TABLE-TOP COLA SIMULATION WITH PHOENIX FD AND TYFLOW

TOP-TABLE DRINKS (COLA) FULL CASE STUDY
WITH PHOENIX FD & TYFLOW AND FULL BUSINESS (PRICING) STUDY

A new standard of course has been established with the brand new VFXTREME "Top-table drinks (Cola) with Phoenix FD" training course geared towards the technically inclined independent or resident studio artist. The learning structure used in this video, gears all users up to be able to follow its contents from start to end.
This is course is not another technical course, this course is a complete case study of how to create and manage full TV CGI spot, from the first client's brief to the final delivery including:
• How to manage the business side of a TV spot in terms of pricing, quoting and offering.
• How to stage the product shot and how to setup the full lighting studio.
• How to setup multiple liquid systems in one scene including creating bubbles, close up detailed water splash, procedural water drops system, and rigid ice cubes explosion as well.
• How to generalize the result setup to produce later Table-top similar scenarios.
Traditionally, Tabletop photography is a branch of still life photography that focuses on capturing items placed on a table. The most common photographic subjects of this genre are food and product photography.
Producing stunning shots of real drink products is a traditional directors' challenge. Over the years, director of photography have developed many closely-guarded trade secrets for creating perfect drinks, both clear and soda (Gaseous).
On the other hand, CG liquid technology is constantly evolving and it seems these days there is nothing that cannot be recreated on a computer. But despite massive advances in rendering power and creative wizardry, marrying CGI liquid simulations with beautiful lighting setup and animation is a huge challenge, and when it comes to ‘directing’ droplets and fluids - artists have to think differently, using tools to slightly bend the rules of fluid behaviour while keeping a natural look and feel overall.
Also, trying to choreograph fluid to behave in a certain way and yet still maintain a naturalness is particularly tricky, add to that, drinks must have just the right transparency, color and viscosity, it should look so fresh, organic and naturally delicious that the viewer can’t resist buying the product and trying it for themselves. We can't achieve that without a perfect lighting setup, which we will learn in this course as well.
In order for us to create very stylized and convincing tabletop shot, beside a strong dynamic based particle system like TYflow, which can manage the rigid and soft body simulation requirements, we will need wide set of liquid simulation tools to be able to customize and control each element of the liquid and its surrounding environment. ChaosGroup's Phoenix FD's fluids & liquids simulation tools has been constantly developed in the last few years in a way which pushed many independent artists and studios to be able to create very convincing small, medium and large scale liquid simulation scenes easily without limitations, including manageable simulation, shading, and rendering times, especially when shaded and rendered via ChaosGroup's Vray.
Technically, in this course, we will be working on creating a full CGI tabletop Coca bottles shot, which will hit a thin layer of water on the ground, causing beautiful splash and a small ice explosion while seeing all the bubbling coca drink inside the bottles swirling and rising up.
This is a Project-based course, where we will discuss in details how to create full production quality drink tabletop shot, we will be covering shading, lighting, and rendering to create final images, as well as the business side of the job itself, it will allow the chance for the users to collaborate what they have learned with us and build their own similar scenes on their own and to be able to win the job and client's satisfaction.

About the author:

Hashem Alshaer is a VFX director/ supervisor and an author with more than 18 years of experience in visual effects for feature films, movies and TVCs as well as in education fields.Coming from mathematics, physics and engineering background, mixed with arts, Hashem is Dedicated to the work on correlations of visual effects, film production, real-time visualization and simulations tools, and seeks out commercially and technically viable ways to form closer working methods /aesthetics/ and production planning which deal with both areas simultaneously. He is the CCO of Archetype media group also works as a CCO at Cmivfx the leading visual effects education provider, as well as TheDivision at Candyshopvfx and 3Quarter LLC/ USA.