Feel like a Nero

The challenge

In "Man, I feel like a Nero", Passion Pictures had Carl the wombat dancing. Dance moves push a rig hard: the body bends and twists far more than in a normal scene, his clothing has to follow every move, and his round belly has to squash and shift without looking rubbery.

What I did

• Body rig update. I reworked Carl's whole body rig so his movement stayed fluid and natural through the dance.
• Facial rig. I built an advanced facial rig with many control points, so animators could hit a wide range of expressions and capture Carl's personality.
• Clothing. I weighted Carl's animatable clothing so it moved with his body, giving the clothing simulation team a solid starting point.
• Belly fat system. I added a new adipose (fat) deformation system around Carl's stomach. It uses a weight controller matrix driven by an ease-in, ease-out algorithm, so the deformation stays smooth as the controls pass through set thresholds, and body and clothing interact more believably.

Rig features included:

• Full IK/FK body rig, with layered tweakers for limb FK/IK tweaking
• Additive bendy and additive fatty setups
• 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

The advert came out in 2024, Carl's first dance number, with all of this work on screen through his routine.