Ultra Reveal

Speed

I animated the camera and the shoe to build the sense of speed, and Boris ran the particle and smoke simulations in Houdini around the boot and its studs. I lit and shaded the whole shot in Cinema 4D and Arnold. To tie the look to the motion, my shaders read attributes baked into the Alembic cache and drove the emission from parameters like velocity, so the glow reacted to how fast things were moving. For the wind-tunnel blast over the shoe, I set up a custom Arnold shader that let me color the VDB volume simulation directly, which kept the effect easy to direct.

Lightness

To read as lightness, the knitted yarn of the shoe's body comes alive. I animated the camera and the shoe, and Boris handled all of the thread animation and simulations from his procedural Houdini setup, kept flexible enough to move the fabric playfully. I took care of the lighting and shading of the yarn strands, the render pipeline and the compositing.

Grip Control

Jerome modeled the Puma ball from reference photos. I animated the camera and the impact between the ball and the boot, adding the FX so the ball deforms convincingly as it presses against the studs, then handled the compositing. I also built a procedural shader that sends light traveling inside the yarn: it reads the UVs of each curve to drive how the light propagates along the threads.

3D renders of the shoe

Here are some hi-res renders from different angles. I pushed the shading to get convincing plastic materials that react to light in a photoreal way.

Procedural 3D fabric

Boris built the fabric as a procedural system in Houdini. Each strand is dozens of individual filaments, and hundreds of thousands of threads recompose the shoe's pattern while staying fully controllable to animate the yarn.