Final Film, Hard Nut Life

Hard Nut Life is a Final Project film for the Computer Animation masters. Produced by Jo Samuel, Nathanael Bennett, Simon Taylor and myself over 3 months. We were responsible for every aspect of its production, from the initial story concept to the final render.

 

Hard Nut Life from Claire Hogg on Vimeo.

 

My roles on the film included designing the look for our squirrels. We were dissapointed with the rodent-like look previous films had achieved and wanted our squirrels to be cute and cartoony whilst still being instantly recognisable in shape and pose. To acheive this, I studied real squirrels and developed various cartoon variations, some examples of which can be seen below.

 

 

Modelling jobs were divided between the team, one of my models being the statue that the squirrels idolise. This was based on a statue in my local park (see photo here), which inspired the story!

 

 

Another of my jobs was texturing and putting dynamic fur on the squirrels. For this we used Joe Alter's Shave and a Haircut plugin for Maya. Each of the main cast of squirrels was textured and styled to have an individual look.

 

Squirrel, furred from Claire Hogg on Vimeo.

 

Unfortunately, after various technical issues and with a month remaining, the decision was made to render without fur. The high hair count required to acheive a professional look and sheer number of squirrels in some of the scenes meant that the film would have needed several months to render on the equipment we had available.

 

Shown below are the final fur models for the crowd squirrels and albino priest.

 

 

I designed, modelled (all character squirrels were adapted from the crowd squirrel model) and rigged the albino high priest. Design development images: