RED-HOT PROTOTYPING.(Chili's restaurant TV commercial)(Technology Information)

Designers spice up a miniature set by using RP technology to generate physical pepper models

What do you get when you incorporate the zest of computer graphics technology with the traditional appeal of stop-animation using practical elements? A spicy new look, which was what the artists at Red Sky achieved while creating a television commercial for the Chili's restaurant chain.

"This was one of those rare occasions when the client just threw a concept at us--in this case, a chili pepper--and said, `have fun,'" says Matthew Charde, executive producer at Red Sky, who was given complete creative control of the project.

The commercial starts out with a chili pepper dangling from a tree, and as the camera zooms in, the pepper begins to pulse. It eventually morphs into a mushroom butterfly, then flies away with other mushroom butterflies--and lands on top of a sizzling plate of Chili's fajitas. To achieve the effects, the Red Sky filmmakers used replacement animation, a common stop-animation technique typically associated with claymation animation, the kind used in the feature film Chicken Run. However, Charde knew that creating a clay model of the "star" in the commercial, Chili's signature pepper, would not have produced the highlights and textures he sought. Moreover, hand-sculpting the object for each animation frame would have been extremely time-consuming and costly for the client.

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To avoid these drawbacks, Red Sky decided to create the physical models using stereolithography. Head CG animator Evan Olsen began by modeling the chili pepper in Alias|Wavefront's Maya, which ran on an SGI Octane, and matched it to a hand-drawn animation sequence created earlier. This enabled him to digitally create all the necessary models and positions that would be needed for the spot.

Before outputting the models, the artists had to convert the Maya files to a compatible CAD program. For this project, they used autodessys's FormZ running on an NT platform, which enabled them to prepare the data for use in a Z Corp. Z402 rapid-prototyping machine. In all, Charde and his team created nearly 100 physical models, each of which were about five inches tall by two inches wide.