Quick note: At the beginning, client was able to grant us an additional 3MB of file size to work with, making the file size
limit 7MB instead of the usual 4MB! While this seemed super generous, it soon became apparent to us that it was still not enough
to fit all the assets in the effect to match our original style ref. So we were able to push for a 10MB file size limit!
Tiffany Diamond's Kira Effect
Aside from the Landmark building, the other main character of the effect was the giant Tiffany Diamond. Especially with the
large scale of the diamond, we had to make sure the diamond was extra shiny and dimensional. We first started with an old
diamond matcap we had previously made for a Rihanna filter and tested with that. But the Tiffany diamond had a really unique
yellow color and a much higher density composition, so we ended up creating a custom matcap - using Midjourney and Photoshop.
To make the diamond even more magical, we added kira and bokeh effects as the diamond rotated. Caustics and pulsing glow
were also layered on top to spotlight the diamond even more. The same kira shader was used for the bejeweled animals later.
Animal Animations
If you open up the project, you'll notice that there were two different animation methods used for the bejeweled animals.
The bird and fish assets had fully baked animations, including their flight/swimming paths. Slight adjustments were made in Spark to change
their transforms slightly and to offset their timing.
The jellyfish and seahorse assets had baked looping (in place) animations, but their transforms were all animated manually
using Spark's keyframe patches. The keyframe workflow in Spark is still very nascent so I would definitely recommend avoiding it as much as possible.
Although doable, the process was very tedious and not efficient at all. If we do ever need to use the keyframe patches in the future,
I'd recommend saving it for really simple and linear animations and/or having CG bake out the complete animation and import it as a temporary
visual aid for animating it in Spark.
We decided to keyframe in Spark largely because we were tight on file size budget (this was before client gave us 10MB).
Environment Textures and Shadow Mapping
Aside from more simple surfaces like the ground, pavement and the street sign, pretty much everything in the
scene is using a baked color and normal map. This was necessary to match our style refs completely.
We also had to use baked shadow maps for the buildings since Spark isn't able to dynamically cast shadows yet.
