Compare the Market, with Passion Pictures · Body rig, facial rig and clothing
Carl the wombat
For Compare the Market's 2022 advert introducing Carl the wombat alongside the meerkats Aleksandr and Sergei, I built Carl's full body rig, advanced facial rig and animatable clothing at Passion Pictures. The rig included a full IK/FK body, an additive bendy setup and a mocap-ready joint-based face. I also rigged a frog on a one-day turnaround.
- Client
- Compare the Market
- Studio
- Passion Pictures
- Role
- Body rig, facial rig and clothing
- Year
- 2022
The challenge
This 30-second spot from Passion Pictures introduced a new character to Compare the Market's long-standing meerkats, Aleksandr and Sergei: Carl the wombat. Carl needed a full character rig for his body, face and clothing, and the advert also featured a frog that had to be rigged on a one-day turnaround.
What I did
I was responsible for Carl's full body rig, advanced facial rig and animatable clothing, set up to support the clothing simulation work. I also rigged the frog in a single day. There is plenty of wombat reference on YouTube, which made it easy to research the shapes the rigs needed.
Rig features included:
- Full IK/FK body rig, with layered tweakers for limb FK/IK tweaking
- Additive bendy setup
- Multiple controller follow setup
- In-house facial setup: a joint-based, mocap-ready setup, a slidey mouth, sticky lips, multiple squash setups, drivable sculpted blendshapes, and eye tweakers, sculptors and shapers
The outcome
Carl launched in 2022 and has since returned in later Compare the Market adverts, including Feel like a Nero, where I updated his rig again. The model was brilliant to work with and the frog rig worked well despite the one-day turnaround.
