Creature: Fluffy

The "Fluffy" hero asset was originally created for a three-week student production, directed by yours truly.

The original idea was for a creature that could be both terrifying and adorable.  The design was heavily inspired by the Dragonbat appearing briefly in Joss Whedon's Cabin in the Woods, various species of bat, as well as extensive prodding of my three house-cats.

The topology, rigging and skinning of the face, the shading, lighting, comping, original concept and direction were the work of Lex Wills.

 

DeSIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

Jaw

The split-jaw design allows Fluffy to open a horrifyingly wide gullet, and then later to close the same gullet into a feline-small chin.  The teeth were references from meat-eating hunters, recreating both the pair of saber-style killing teeth and triangular-blade back teeth which we unconsciously associate with dangerous carnivores.

Making the long tongue back roll into the mouth was a particular challenge.

Ears

An animals ears can give such an enormous range of expression, especially for large, articulate ears.  To achieve this here, exhaustive reference was studied of the anatomical structures that allow bat and feline ears to prick, fold and rotate (with a fair amount of fiddling with my own cats’ ears too), all to make Fluffy’s massive ears look like they realistically could achieve their enormous range of movement: from flat backwards (above) in aggression/fear, to dropping down past shoulders in sadness and pricking straight up in surprise.

 

Eyes

The eyes were another important part, needing to be able to shrink to pinprick-pupils in veiny eye-whites (horror technique to creature fear by showing it in another’s eyes) all the way to massively flooded, adorable cow-eyes where the pupil dominated most of the eye.  A custom eye rig was made to achieve this, the colours, vein, reflectivity and many other setting extensively tested to achieve the most dynamic look.

Then began…

Post Processing

With such a short project time, re-rendering the beauty passes was not feasible, allowing only one chance to get it right.  At least it would have done, were it not for the magic of Nuke.

To ensure that I still had very fine control over every part and every detail of the image, twelve additional matt-ID layers were also made (alongside the more usual Fresnel, AO and Reflection passes).  All these matt-ID layers were ultra-fast to render and gave ultra-fine tuning over every individual element you see below, right up until the final submission.

The Nuke script that achieved this will be uploaded here shortly, in the hopes that it will be useful a fun introduction tutorial to rgb-masking in Nuke.