Creating a Chameleon: Take a guided tour of the technical innovation behind our latest work for JBL with this behind-the-scenes video.

Join us behind the scenes of our latest work for JBL, highlighting the color-changing nature of their Pulse bluetooth speaker.

Technical achievements really made way for artistic style on this project. The chameleon was a masterpiece of Jonah Freidman (R&D, Psyop), combining a particle system with a curve based grooming system. We also developed a Nuke pipeline that allowed changes to the chameleon’s texture to be real-time previewed in Nuke, iterated, and then run back through the traditional CG pipeline to get all the photo-real light interaction and skin imperfections. Everyone involved did a stellar job.

“On this one we really leveraged our technology to create something new. Using Fabric Engine, we developed a set of tools that allowed artists to create a whole chameleon worth of scales. They would create scales by generating a particle flow over the surface. We took this artistically-generated particle distribution and built a computational geometry system on top of it. This system could generate each scale as a unique interlocking 3D shape for a hyper-realistic result.

The other really cool technique was using Nuke to remap the textures quickly without a full render in Arnold.  This was awesome as we were able to quickly iterate until the camouflage gags worked. By creating a whole new set of tools we were able to execute a cinematic and deeply human hero who falls on his face a few times before getting to the girl of all our dreams. The result is a relatable, lovable short film about a classic anti-hero.”

-Eben Mears, Director