Geoff is a heart-warming story about a young boy whose passion for Beanz ultimately lands him his dream job as Heinz Head of Innovation. As he goes through life, Geoff designs and names a range of new Beanz can sizes based on his own personal milestones: single life, married life, young kids, teenage kids. The cans Geoff designed in his animated world were simultaneously released in the real-world, in supermarkets across Australia.

One of the big technical challenges we faced during concepting was the handling of the other hero character in the piece: the baked beans. This presented a particular challenge as we needed to simulate a soft-body (the bean) within a viscous fluid (the sauce).

For this we continued development on our in-house, real-time SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) fluid simulator and created extensions to include destructible soft-bodies (the beans). This all ran on the GPU allowing real-time testing and simulation. This was then translated into our stylized scenes where the particle simulations were meshed, given textures and shaders, then lit within the 3D environment.

We used a similar system earlier in the project to get the curls into Geoff's hair. By extending the soft-body into a straight, spiky haired rest pose, we can then run the simulation with a set of parameters to curl up the hair.