Lottoland, with Jellyfish Pictures · Chimp facial mocap and animation rig
Evolution
For Lottoland's 2016 Evolution TV advert, I built the chimpanzee's facial motion capture rig and animatable rig in Maya at Jellyfish Pictures. The rig had a one-day turnaround, with facial controls and a lip joint setup tested against chimpanzee reference. It ran at over 100 frames per second on the animators' quad-core machines.
- Client
- Lottoland
- Studio
- Jellyfish Pictures
- Role
- Chimp facial mocap and animation rig
- Year
- 2016
- Tech
- Maya
The challenge
Lottoland's 2016 "Evolution" TV advert, made at Jellyfish Pictures, needed a chimpanzee whose face could be driven by facial motion capture and also animated by hand. The rig had a one-day turnaround, and it had to stay fast enough for animators to work with it interactively.
What I did
I built the chimp's facial mocap rig and the animatable rig asset.
- Research. There is a huge amount of chimpanzee reference on YouTube, which made it easy to work out which facial shapes the rig needed: pouts, open-mouthed calls and aggressive screams.
- Facial controls. Control curves around the mouth and jaw, so animators could pose the face directly or refine the motion capture.
- Lip joints. A joint setup around the lips to shape the muzzle, tested pose by pose against reference photos.
The outcome
The rig was delivered on the one-day turnaround and ran at over 100 frames per second on the animators' quad-core machines, so they could play back and pose in real time.
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