Furry Fellas
First we thought we could get away with some clever textures to fake the fur of the Knuffel but after the first few animatic stages it became clear that they needed to dance and sing in closeups. That's the only way you can properly appreciate the cuteness of these girls and guys. So we adjusted our plan and went full proper fur on all of them. It really payed of in the final piece.
A rather big challenge was to get them look soft enough. In early tests the fur always turned out too rough and rugged looking. Heavy use of SSS on the underlying skin surface was to key to a soft and fluffy appearance. It took a bit longer to render but was well worth the wait.
Everybody.... Dance!
Animation was done if a very classical straightforward way. No MoCap, no Kinect scanning, no automatically-driven-by-music-morphs,... Just a rig and keyframes for ultimate control and maximum fun for our character animators. There's no moonwalk in the spot, but we've been *this* close of animating one.
Downside of this process is watching all those hours of reference videos of Katy Perry though. (Phil Collins was a huge help for the drumming pumpkin.)
The Rig
was, in general, very stable.
A flexible cartoony facial setup, dynamic parts for the things the Knuffel carry on their heads and the possiblity to deform the characters in exaggerated ways called for a rig which turned out rather advanced. Just to be safe we baked everything to point caches before rendering. That worked well, most of the times
Credits
Client: PENNY Markt
Agency: serviceplan campaign 3 gmbh
Agencyproducer; Neverest GmbH & Co. KG
Soundstudio: Hastings Audio Network, Hamburg
Music Production: Supreme Music GmbH
Off-Voice: Rasmus B.
Creative Director: Christian Tyroller
Director: Leo Akinbiyi
Producer: Julian Fischer
Head of Production: Matthias Zabiegly
Head of Animation: Leo Akinbiyi
Animators: Alexander Bootz, Can Erduman
Modelling & Rigging: Holger Biebrach, Fabian Rosenkranz
3D Artists: Jens Kindler, Raphael Rau
Compositing: Tobias Müller