Spaniel Puppy – Virtual Pet
Cute CG pet required
After we won the contract to recreate the Duracell Bunny in CGI we quickly realised that we needed to take our fur rendering technology to the next level. The problem was that we would need to turn around the animation in a matter of weeks, but we wouldn’t get the bunny design assets for a month after the project started.
Want to see some puppies?
In order to minimise our risk for our client, we decided the best solution was to create a cute spaniel puppy whilst we waited for the bunny, this way we could test our fur pipeline from start to finish and have it all ready to fire on all cylinders once the Duracell assets were ready.
Bigman – bespoke puppy grooming salon!
Matching the type of curly hair that a real spaniel has was very challenging, as all the different bits of the pup have different colours and different types of clumping or curliness. We had to create a new ‘groom’ department to handle the work and upgrade to new fur software that could hand realistic simulation of the fur’s gravity and inertia.
Data overload!
Another problem we faced was rendering thousands of frames of animation, each with thousands of hairs and millions of rays of light bouncing around them. We will spare you the geeky details but to summarise we had to perform some clever technical tricks in the rendering pipeline in order to optimise the amount of data we had to deal with.
A well disciplined pup
Everyone was thrilled with the adorable cute character that we made, a great way to expand the capabilities and bandwidth of our studio and a perfect wholesome brand ambassador in its own right.