Waffle Toaster 3D Animation

Birds Eye & Morphy Richards April Fool’s Waffle Toaster 3D Animation

Background

Partnering with our friends at Cirkle, we worked with Birds Eye – the beloved company known for its diverse and tasty variety of food, including potato waffles. As well as Morphy Richards – the well-known experts at creating high-quality electrical appliances, such as toasters and kettles. To celebrate the Birds Eye Potato Waffle turning 40 this year, they teamed up with Morphy Richards to create this fun April fools production.

The Task

The goal of this project was to create a fun and wacky waffle toaster 3d animation April fools video in order to prank the country into believing that a toaster made for the sole purpose of cooking waffles (not being able to even cook toast) was now available!

The video was going to be a 3D, photorealistic, animation of a brand new concept of this waffle-only toaster, and here at Painting Pixels, we were extremely excited to bring this wacky creation to life!

We needed to design the toaster itself, create and compose the entire scene and all of its assets, set up lighting and layout, and finally, the camera work ready for the final animation and still shot renders, ready to be shown to the world!

Process

After the project brief and specifications, it was time to begin the concepting stage of the design of the waffle toaster 3d model, through expertly sketched concept art designs, with different styles, in which we worked with the clients to produce the most ideal waffle toaster design over several iterations.

After approval from the clients on the initial concepts, these 3 concepts were designed based on their input, and we began the prototyping stages of these concepts, in order to showcase an actual waffle toaster 3D render of the three concepts in a 3D environment.

These prototype, concept renders would not be fully polished, with some materials and photorealism elements missing, due to the use of these renders being used to develop the actual design of the waffle toaster itself.

These prototype renders would prove invaluable in developing and finalizing the design and model of the waffle-toaster, and the other elements of the scene, thanks to the great input and feedback of our clients.

These designs were later developed to use the shape of prototypes #2 and #3, with the waffle-like imprints on prototypes #1.

Once the final models, textures, lighting, and animation keyframes were set up, we were ready to hit render and export the final scene into animation, as well as some 4K single-shot images.

After the render process was complete, we entered the post-production stage of the project, in which we expertly enhanced the aesthetics and photorealism of the animation, by adding colour-grading, motion-blur, depth of field, as well as other tweaks to really make the animation “pop”!

Result

The final renders of the waffle toaster animation were exported and ready to go live on that exciting day that everyone loves; April 1st!

Both we, and the clients, were very pleased with the outcome and immensely enjoyed working with our friends at Cirkle on developing this fun and interesting project to completion!

The public reception to the waffle-toaster on social media and in the mainstream media was exceptional and everyone loved the idea! (some people even believed it was real and wanted one for themselves!)

As you can see, the waffle toaster really took off and became a funny April fools day prank enjoyed by many across the country!

The Birds Eye team liked our production so much that they sent us a (delicious) present to show their thanks for the animation, which we really appreciate, click here to see what they sent us!

To get your own 3D production started, like this waffle toaster 3d animation, whether it be an animation, renders, or an explainer showcase, make sure to check out our 3D animation service and let’s get started on something today!