Photorealism, creature work, and Chocolate Tribe. A match made in heaven. We were thrilled to be approached by Fastrack, an Indian fashion accessory retail brand, to create a fully CGI orangutan for their latest fashion eyewear commercial. We created an orangutan before, and were happy to try and improve on what we learned during the production of the Checkers commercial. 

The creative team worked in Autodesk Maya for animation, Arnold for lighting and rendering, Yeti for the fur system and Ziva from Unity for the model, muscle and movement simulation.

Ziva as a tool allows the full reproduction of realistic muscle, fat and skin slide simulations. It can create an accurate simulation of the underlying skeletal structure and also manipulates the behavior of soft tissue and tendons. A vital ingredient to getting that photorealistic weight, look and feel.

Yeti was amazing to work with on the orangutan’s hair and fur. It was important to get the details right, and with Yeti’s node based workflow, gave the team an amazing amount of control over the dynamics, hair flow, length, density, color and texture of hair and fur.

From an animation point of view, The Tribe spent a lot of time to find a balance between creature and character animation. Although the client was keen to make it look as realistic as possible, they were also aware that the performance of the orangutan needed to connect with the viewer in less than 12 seconds. We filmed performance reference plates during the shoot with an actor, and experimented with a lot of different performance animation options to find the right level of expression.