The Idea

This small project started with an idea to illustrate the fragrance of Brume Orpin, a prestigious perfume brand from France.

The main focus was to showcase the bottle on a beach in an elegant way. I envisioned the bottle emerging from the sand, slowly uncovering itself to reveal its sophisticated design and the brand’s logo at the base.

The Bottle

First things first, I needed to create a model of the bottle. I modeled it using reference photos of the real bottle, both with and without the cap — a fairly straightforward process. The entire model was created and textured in Blender using Octane Renderer.

No intricate material details were necessary since the bottle appeared quite large in the render but was positioned far from the camera.

Then I made a really simple animation of the bottle, rising from the ground.

Source Video

The location was chosen based on the area I live in and the product’s name, which had a reference to the sea.

I filmed a short sequence with my iPhone 14 Pro Max using the Blackmagic Cam app, then tracked everything in DaVinci Resolve and transferred the camera animation data to Blender for further work.

Sand Simulation

The next step was to simulate the sand the bottle was traversing. This task was entirely handled by our good old friend—Houdini. 🤠

I imported the ground plane and the animated bottle into Houdini, then created a basic POP sand simulation using geometry generated from the ground plane.

Composite

Once the render was finished, it was time for compositing. I used Fusion in DaVinci Resolve for this process.

The first step was isolating the rocks in front of the sand object. I used a tracking-based rotoscoping method to create a mask for the entire clip duration, which was then applied to the rendered layers.

The rest of the setup was straightforward, consisting of the base video, followed by the shadow layer, and finally the beauty pass layer of the objects.

Final animation

The final animation captures the bottle emerging from the sand on a secluded French Riviera beach. As the sand shifts away, the elegant design is revealed, enhanced by warm sunlight and soft shadows, creating a luxurious and captivating visual.