Lladró and I worked again in the Christmas campaign of 2023. Compared to the previous 3D campaign we made, this one aims to take the magic of the brand one step further for their current customers and potentially engage with a younger audience with new magazines and a VR animation (only displayed in stores for customers), aside from the main animated commercial and social media content.

The theme for this campaign is set in a cute and snowy virtual forest during Christmas where LLADRÓs beautiful porcelain products live in it. It had to look soft yet elegant and surreal while still being winter themed.

Flowers, butterflies, animals and even lamps take the main role in this colorful and magical world which showcases the three main categories of Lladró catalog: Heritage, New Concept and Lighting.

The brand has established itself as a high luxury decorative brand for more than years 70 with a high demand and recognition across the seas which makes it very famous among people who is around 40-50 years old or more. In this case the client wants to generate engagement with a younger audience who are not familiar with the brand. This will be notable through the colour palette used in the project along with the shapes that will compose the environments I have to work on.

The first thing to work on is the language in which we will talk to customers through all promotional content, and thats the iconography.

I started working on single 3D elements and icons with color variations that would make up for both the environments and the magazine. This meant the starting point in setting the look&feel of the rest of the campaign.

Once we had 3D icons, I moved on to the environments and renders. These are splitted in 2 groups: renders of different places of the magic forest that include Lladró products and simpler scenarios with the product above a pedestal. Mean while, Lladró team worked on the page layouts for the magazine. Creating the forest wasnt an easy task. It implied different sketches to start with (lots were discarded) and once we found interesting ideas I started importing scanned products, blocking scenes and work on more elements such as trees and plants based on pieces of Lladró products (these would be animated later on).

The product shown in these scenes would be different depending on the version of the catalogue (just like Pokemon, yay). Again, it could be Heritage or New Concept.

Amid sketching process, one of the demanded renders by the client was a forest shot that included the two signature products of the campaign: the squirrel and the fox. This shot would be included in the magazine and reused in the main animation which is the highlight project of the whole campaign. It would also be the head element in the webpage so it couldnt be miss.

These Hero products were 3D scanned and then retopologized to make them usable. Aside from being textured, they also had to be animated.

Once the environments and renders were finished, I was able to reimport more material into the animation project with the purpose of connecting these spaces and prove how Lladró figures live altogether in the forest. The best way to showcase all these spaces was through a one directioned camera travelling that moves through these spaces creating a 2D parallax effect with the advantages of 3D scenery.

Since I worked on a parallax, motion came from the camera itself, but it also had to be felt through the vegetation and environment. For this, I rigged the plants with bone armatures and animated them with idle movements in loops taking into account delays to bring an independent timing and therefore a realistic effect. These bone structures would also be used for animating the squirrel and the fox ears.

Another resource used in giving a lively effect on the forest was adding butterflies flying around the forest. In the first draft it was a cute bee, but it got changed by two butterflies referencing another Lladró product. These were animated and tracked through curves and key shapes.

The project took different iterations based on what figures from the catalogue would be included. We even modified the Kokeshi lamp to make it look like a cute house in the middle of the forest. In the first script of the animation, The Guest figure would live in it and walk through the forest carrying a present. This idea got scrapped due to project constraints.

The final product became a more cohesive and less funky version, reinforcing the softness, surreality of the forest and magic of Christmas with the help of a voice-over accompanying the viewer.

In order to reach the complete target audience, we made an alternative animation reusing the same assets and adapting it into a 360º scene with the purpose of rendering it and displaying it as a VR 360º video which would only be displayed in stores.

Customers who like to regularly visit and make purchases in Lladró stores could enjoy of this experience by putting VR glasses at the same moment. This way, people who are not familiar with online shopping could enjoy the magic of Christmas as well. Link to the VR experience on Vimeo: --https://vimeo.com/883230741/82f94fc999

In technical terms, rendering a fully loaded 360 scene is too heavy and a hell for the machine to handle. To sort this problem, I used render layers. First, I took 3 renders of the whole scene (with both lamps turned off, then 1 and then 2) and then rendered all the frames of the animated elements independently with transparent background so they were way lighter to render and could also be overlayed with Adobe Premiere.

The last project involving the Christmas campaign were display renders for the windows of the store. In these, the signature products would be displayed and decorated with cardboard crafts and large scale printed renders of the magical forest.