Ikea

To accompany IKEA’s recent television commercial, the Rushes CG team created a beautiful range of kitchen designs for an interactive experience on IKEA’s website. Each of the themed designs shows visitors information about how we spend time in our kitchens. Working closely with Mother and IKEA’s kitchen designers, Rushes created a range of six kitchens that seamlessly transform into each other.

 

Animation for the project was an interesting logistical challenge. Each of the kitchens had a unique layout to animate in and out of, as if on a turntable. A looping animation takes over once one kitchen leaves and transforms into any of the other five kitchens that the user happens to choose. To make this work we implemented solutions involving matching the speeds and locations of the different kitchen cabinets for each sequence. Collisions between kitchen cabinets in the transitions presented a problem but was solved by subtly animating parts of the kitchen towards or away from camera, allowing other cabinets to move in-between.

 

Lighting the kitchens presented a challenge; we needed to recreate the familiar IKEA aesthetic, which is so recognisable, and with all the cabinets and walls moving. The lighting also had to adapt to avoid overexposing areas of the set. Importantly, the lighting had to precisely match between each kitchen so that there wasn’t a flicker between transitions. 

 

The final step was to encode and deliver the animated graphics to Wilderness, who developed the web front-end, as well as designing and animating the infographics over the top. Accomplishing such a complex build in a relatively short time, fast feedback and close collaboration was essential between all parties, and the result is testament to the success of that process. The interactive experience can viewed on IKEA’s website, whilst stills from the project were used to support IKEA’s national press campaign.

Chris Lynd at Mother comments, “This was a super tricky project. There were a lot of moving parts, both at the 3D and production and the site development stages and the timing was incredibly tight. Andy, Norra, Georgina and Simon made it all run like a well oiled machine. Not only did they do an awesome job on the creating and animating each of the sets, the team had a fantastic technical grasp of how the output slotted into the interactive experience and really made that part of the process seamless. Literally seamless. It was an absolute pleasure to work with the team. They continually went over and above the call of duty and have an impossible amount of energy and enthusiasm and the work is fantastic.”

See the interactive website here: www.ikea.com/ms/en_GB/about_ikea/kitchen_campaign_page.html