Photorealism and creature work. Our team was approached by the Indian fashion accessory brand Fastrack with a project to create a fully CGI Orangutan for their eyewear 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 muscle and skin 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 manipulate the behavior of soft tissue and tendons. A vital ingredient to getting that photorealistic weight of the movement. Yeti was amazing to work with on the orangutan’s hair and fur. It was important to get the details right, and 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. Since the orangutan is largely covered in fur, this was vital to get the look right. From an animation point of view, The Tribe spent a lot of time finding 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 within 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. After several months, our orangutan is right there on screen. Alive and breathing. Connecting with the audience.