Our Republic Design team had a little fun this spring teaming up with BeautifulBeast for DFW Airport’s April Fool’s Day post. The task at hand – recreate a classic practical joke in a very impractical way. Here’s a little peek behind the curtain at how we pulled it off.
The first step went to our Republic Production team, who we sent to shoot plates of an empty tarmac at DFW Airport. Our Design crew had already done some pre-visualizations ahead of time, and that gave them direction on the specifics of how to shoot the plates needed.
From there, our Design crew took over. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of their process as told by Elijah Sheffield, our Associate Creative director who lead the team.
“Starting with a 3D model of a 737 airplane, we retopologized the plane’s exterior mesh for cleaner geometry (for a more optimized normal map), created a system of geometry nodes in Blender using a calculation that may be familiar to many as “Poisson Disk” to ensure equidistant space between each note, baked and exported the systems as an alembic file, brought it all into Maxon’s Cinema 4D to light and texture the scene, composited the human assets viewing the aircraft, balanced the elements together and added movement to simulate capture from a bystander’s camera phone.”
If it’s a little hard to understand what all of this means, just take a look at our breakdown below.
