First, want to say kudos to everyone at the Dell Experience Design group for working so hard to bring artistry and passion to Dell system design.  They’ve come a long way from the black box and have a host of world class designers changing the way PC’s are crafted.

A couple of weeks ago, Dell launched a new teaser video promoting their upcoming laptop “Adamo”. This video shows robotic arms putting together numerous computer components to form this ultra-slim aluminum laptop.

We were fortunate enough to work directly with Adamo’s designer, Nicolas Denhez with Dell’s Experience Design Group.  This was great because we were able to get first hand access to what this laptop was all about, and what he was wanting to achieve. Following Nic’s lead on the desired mood and style, we went for a slow paced high-tech ethereal feel.  Some of the videos we really liked and wanted to use as reference were Chris Cunningham’s  Bjork music video “All is Full of Love“, and Joseph Kosinski’s “Saab.Blackbird“  commercial.  There was definitely a desire  to promote the craftsmanship involved in the assembly of the pieces.

On the production side, we used XSI for pre-production, animation and rendering.  Tim Crowson modeled the robotic arms in Luxology’s Modo.   They were then brought into XSI for rigging and shading. The arms design was based on some concepts drawings done in house, but when came time to model, we needed to figure out how things moved. We went over the range of movements we needed based on the storyboard and 2D animatic, then modeler and set up got together to figure out how to achieve them. According to Steven Alley, our set up artist, the ” rig was a simple IK setup with up vectors and path constraints”. (I tried to get more out of him about it, but he told it wasn’t anything to brag about… so I guess I won’t. )

Shaded wireframe view of robotic arm modeled in Modo.

Different surface renditions rendered out of Modo. We were experimenting with some shaders that had some Sub Surface Scattering. Ultimately, we decided to go with a non translucent shader.

On the rendering and compositing side, we used your regular passes such as color, reflection, AO, Depth. It took several stabs to get the anodized aluminum surface of the Adamo laptop just right by using a tiny flakey/grainey surface and XSI’s architectural shader.

We’ve been able to create a nice little pipeline to go between XSI and After Effects, and export camera moves, nulls, etc… For Adamo we exported the camera data, and animated nulls to drive the position our particle emitter in After Effects. We chose to do particles in AE fro a couple of reasons. First, there was minimal interaction with the environment ( just a bounce/slide on flat surface).  Second,  we could achieve the look we were going for much faster using Trapcode’s Particular.