HI this is our last tv commercial done in Blender and Softimage for an Italian brand of cookies.
We did all the modeling, texturing,lighting and rendering (Cycles) in Blender.
Instead the animation and rigging was done in Softimage.
We handled the data between the two software via mesh cache modifier (.mdd cache).
I hope you enjoy the commercial.
Hi! It looks great. Do you have a link to the video?
Thnx FredHystair!! you should see it on top of the post, anyway here’s the direct link to the video.
Emiliano
Fantastic! How long did it take?
I like it, very professional!
Grazie Tiago!!! we spent one month and half to finish it.
Here the full credits list about our team:
Producer: Silvia Stellabotte
Art Director / Concept Designer: Silvia Stellabotte
3D modelling : Marco Facciolini, Stefano Ciarrocchi
Character TD: Paolo Fazio
Animator: Michele Andreoli
Compositing / Look dev : Emiliano Colantoni
Blender swap assets:
Microwave oven: Rich33584
Toaster: Printer Killer
Top notch! On all aspects.
The character animation and camera works are great. Lighting, rendering and comping are awesome.
Anything you found as a roadblock with Cycles that you had to do workarrounds?
Great job! I love seeing Blender being used in commercial projects.
Why do you use Blender instead of other software and are there any major things that make it harder to use in commercial environment compared to max or some other software? I am also interested how long rendering this out took and how many hours went into making? 
Looks really good and very interesting that you decided to use mix programms, is there a problem with Softimage?
I have really never even opened it, but have heard very good things.
And what did you use for compositing?
Thanks.
Thanks you very much guys we really appreciate your comments!!
We switched to Blender from Softimage (Autodesk _) 2 years ago because Blender is a great piece of software. But we are a small collective, and we don’t have all the resources in house permanently. So, in this work we used Softimage for animation because the character td and the animator don’t use Blender.
About the render we used Cycles, and it gave us some headache to find out a good result in a reasonable render time.
And the final decision was to use for all the main part a pre rendered background mapped on a box. With this workaround the render time was around 4-5 min for frame (350 passes) and 10 min ( 600 passes) for the first 36 frames where the background was all in 3D.
Sorry for my english!!
Emiliano
Nice job for tv commercial, everything is very well integrated from rendering (even low passes look great and smooth).
In last screenshot, how you make for window as transparency and then look background (garden) tought it? Have you used compo from blender ?
Good job, thanks for share how You make it.
wow… we get inspired … 
For the comp we used Internal Softimage compositor and After effects.
We managed the comp splitting the scene in three layer 1°-table and characters 2°-kitchen ( prerendered background with alpha channel) and 3°-garden.
With this setup we easily managed in compositing stuff like dof, light wrap , etc.
Thanks everybody 
E.
Really great! Why did you guys use Softimage instead of Blender for the animation (just curious)? Using .mdd is a great solution btw.
*Edit- Just read how your td and animator don’t know Blender which is why you used SoftImage for that part.
Thank you Tommy!!
Great work Emiliano!!
Edit: I just saw your vimeo channel, you have pretty cool stuff there! How many people are you in the studio?
Great stuff!
We started in four people in the 2007 (one year before the big financial crisis in Italy…what a great idea!!! _).Today The Shift is composed by two founders, me and Silvia Stellabotte.
But easily we are able to scale up our team via outsourcing for stuff like this, because in these years we had a lot of connections with good guys 
If you have the patience for translate some italian words, here an article with other stuff to see.
I hope that is understandable!!!
Emiliano
This is very cool. great job on the characters, very cute.
