A CGI Dog from Finish using Yeti and Bokeh
When Finish CG Supervisor Harin Hirani was tasked with creating a realistic dog for UK Life Insurance company, Beagle Street, he chose to use both Yeti and Bokeh to get the desired result. We recently spoke with Harin and asked about his experience using both of our products together – here’s what he had to say.
“The job required a photo realistic CGI dog which consisted of multiple fur elements such as the main body, whiskers, eyelashes and eyebrows. I was responsible for all look development of the dog which included modelling, texturing, shading and the fur grooming. The dog appears in the majority of shots ranging from full body wide shots to extreme facial close ups.”
“We were exploring a number of fur solutions for this particular job as we needed something that could give us more control and flexibility than what we currently had. We quickly fell in love with Yeti’s node based workflow and the power it gave us to create and layer up multiple complicated fur systems. The dog has very specific fur characteristics that change over different parts of the body so we knew we would need to have the ability to match this easily.”
He went on to tell us that, “The advert itself was shot with very narrow depth of field so we knew we would need to match the defocus and with the render times being expensive, rendering the depth of field in the renderer wasn’t an option. That’s when we looked into rendering this job in deep and using post Bokeh as it gave us very clean artifact free blur and natural lens defects like chromatic aberration and the ability to make adjustments to these at the compositing stage.”
When asked, if he was able to achieve all of his goals for the project and if Yeti and Bokeh accommodated all of his needs, Harin told us that, “We had a very good system in place using Yeti whereby we could carry on working with the model and the groom in parallel and know that we could update everything accordingly before sending things off to render. Yeti made it very easy to accommodate changes in the pipeline. Using Bokeh allowed us to achieve a natural defocus on the dog which meant he sat in quite convincingly on the live action plates.” We’d have to agree with him on this!
Harin also added, “We were really impressed with the speed of the viewport previews; this helped us massively when we were creating the look of the fur. It was nice having the confidence of knowing what we see in the viewport is a good representation of what we would get at render time!”
We think this spot is great and love that both Yeti and Bokeh were used together. Well done, Harin and the team at Finish!
View the full spot here.