After having just successfully completed some great looking fluid dynamic work for Digital Domain on a Mazda spot, Christian Hogue, our Creative Director partner from Lost in Space tasked us with creating a photoreal close-up of swirling chocolate for a pack shot on an Axe body spray commercial. After reviewing alot of different reference footage and determining the best look for the chocolate with BBH Tokyo's creatives we set out to figure out the best way to simulate the swirling motion and all the overlapping chocolate tendrils.

As we had also recently done some fluid simulations of a crashing wave and discovered that so much of what happens on the top of a fluid surface is guided by the shape of the bottom it comes in contact with, we built a specially shaped bowl that served to funnel the various chocolate tendrils over each other and carefully choreographed the motion of the emitters to create a variation in thickness and speed. The lighting and shading of the chocolate geometry came together fairly easily and Christians background in photography really helped in setting up a lighting model similar to a typical photo product shoot.