A TV commercial hits its target.(Target Corp. contracts with Radium)

The department store Target is known for its whimsical, stylized television commercials that feature men, women, and children--and, of course, the signature Target dog--moving at a fast pace within a setting dominated by its other signature of red and white colors and bull's-eye. Recently, the store began a new "Product People" campaign that contains a similar colorful, active, and theatrical look as the previous commercials. But, on the other hand, it is a marked departure from the earlier design-oriented spots: In place of the energetic actors are energetic 3D characters made from everyday items that can be purchased at the store.

After completing the design phase, Radium, which crafted the spot, used Autodesk's Maya to model all the objects that would later comprise the characters, from a "woman" composed of nail polish and cosmetic-related items to an "athlete" made from sporting goods: a football face, tennis ball eyes, and a basketball belly.

Next, the crew photographed the actual products under studio lighting, first to enhance their natural color and texture, and then to give them a photoreal quality and retail appeal that would be retained in CG. The lighting pipeline was based on global illumination techniques to achieve the desired mix between photorealism and stylization, notes Aladino Debert, lead CG artist and head of CG at Radium.

The group had to design characters that would be not only photorealistic, but also fun to watch. Their anthropomorphic nature dictated that the artists use motion capture for the animation. So, first the artists created simple rigs of each character within Maya that mocap facility House of Moves (HOM) used during motion-capture sessions. At HOM, the animation was derived by motion-capturing a set of live dance performers (seven dancers responsible for a total of 14 actor/character combinations) within a 40x40-foot capture space using a Vicon MX 40 camera setup. During the ...