Street Vision

Monks' reference was an AI-generated mood image. I kept only its skyline as a backplate and built the rest in 3D: the props, a procedural ground, and a puddle that reshapes for every camera angle. The hard part was the rain. Slow motion breaks the usual cheats, so the rain is simulated to hit the jacket, the puddle and the ground.

The water running down the jacket is an animated normal and roughness map, not geometry. Cheaper to render and easier to direct. The stand gets the same treatment, and procedural ripples on the puddle and ground slow down with the shot.

Every light is rendered as its own pass and balanced in After Effects, so the look can change without re-rendering. The lightning is not an exposure flash: real lights fire from different angles and hit the jacket. Built in Cinema 4D and Octane, the garment in Marvelous Designer, the rain on the ground in Houdini.

Snow builds on the Boreas until a burst of wind shakes it loose in slow motion, revealing the clean jacket underneath. The snow is a Houdini simulation that collides with the swaying jacket, flake by flake.

Same approach as the SF3: every light is its own pass, balanced in After Effects. The key was splitting the snow into two simulations, the snowfall in the background and the snow that builds up and shakes off the jacket. Rendered separately, each one could be lit and graded on its own in comp, and the jacket stays readable through the storm.

Day turns to night in one move, a car's headlights sweep across the fence, and the reflective V lights up. The passing car becomes the cut back to daylight, closing the loop.

This is where AI earned its place. The shot needed a real day-to-night time lapse, and the schedule had no room to shoot one. I generated stills with the look of a Nike backdrop, retimed them into a time lapse that fits the camera move, and used the same plate as an HDRI. The light on the jacket and the fence comes from the sky behind them, so it reads as one source.

Every jacket was rebuilt in 3D from studio photos and checked detail by detail against the real product. Three of us made it: I directed and handled previz, look dev, lighting, rendering and comp, Tanzim Rahat built the jackets in Marvelous Designer and Substance Painter, and Kevin Weber ran the snow in Houdini. AI helped sketch the storyboards and some background plates. The jackets, camera, rain, snow and light are all CG.