Beer Tree: Making Of The Ultimate Christmas Project

The Making Of The Beer Tree (& its stop motion animation).

YouTube have removed the audio from this video.

I have had lots of messages asking for more pictures, how the bottle tree was built and how the video was made with camera motion. Originally I planned to just put together a slide show of some of the behind the scenes photos we had taken. I ended up playing about with 3D animation as well, with glass materials, cloth simulation and camera matching to a photo. This animation took well over a month to render - mainly due to the quantity of glass objects with their reflections and refractions of each other and all the wire. In fact the final sequence is a composite of two renderings - the bottom 6 layers (692 bottles) and the top 14 layers (658 bottles). This was necessary due to the enormous memory requirements preventing all 1050 bottles (plus wire) rendering together. There are a total of 17 layers to the tree with the overlapping renders aiding the composite as the bottles above, below and behind affect the rendering of the glass.

This should give you some scale and prove to those sceptical few that it was not fake .It took much more time and effort to do the 3D animation in this, than the original stop motion! And this is quite clearly CGI - compare it to the original.

The original video can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp8jIPaX9BM

Construction, Photography & Disposal.

Bottle Preparation & Post Production not included.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Ultimate
• Christmas
• Project
• Beer
• Bottles
• Stubbies
• Wire
• Tree
• Making
• 3D
• CGI
• Animation
• Glass
• Cadamally
• xmas
• x-mas

[a47112000]

Who cares about building. What is more interesting: How many days/hours did he spend drinking?

[tweetnes]

WOW WOW WOW.... That was GREAT!

[TonyDog360]

Awesome man!

[waterspook]

Goodness, very nicely done! From the first vid on LH to this followup. BZ!

[krazykipa]

Wow. I'm stunned.

Great CG, editing and idea!

Brilliant...

[xGamerGuy]

i wanna know too.

[zann555]

Just terrific. How many days/hours did you spend building it?

[Ctasker5]

wow ppl dont be drinking that much beer at once or even in a year, u should collect them from different people but i would say that was a pretty awsome tree

[Soulja3ll]

gr8