How Framestore created a menagerie of talking animals for a Danish dairy
Framestore has recently completed six months’ production on a campaign for Arla Dairy, which required it to lip-sync numerous animal muzzles and create two fully CG characters across 57 commercials. The campaign for the global dairy company takes a fly-on-the-wall look at an imaginary farm full of talking animals.
The Framestore team’s challenge was to create seven CG muzzles and a CG squirrel and chaffinch. Lead technical director Alex Doyle explains: “The main CG task was to build a photorealistic squirrel using Maya, with rendering in mental ray. To achieve this we used our in-house grooming system and asset setup pipeline to develop the look of the squirrel.”
With extensive knowledge in creating creatures with fur, the team chose to use different software for the bird. “The chaffinch was created in Houdini,” says Doyle. “We used our in-house procedural feather system to create the photorealistic look of the feathers. It’s a huge challenge to replicate authentic-looking feathers in CG, and with this system we were able to achieve a very detailed and realistic bird rendering in Mantra using Houdini VEX shaders.”
Find 2012′s best 3D movies at our sister site, Creative Bloq.
Posted on Friday, September 14th, 2012 at 12:49 pm under Commercial, Features, Showcase. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: Houdini, Mantra, Maya, mental ray
The world's leading magazine for CG artists Subscribe Now
