We had an opportunity to work with Ceylan Jawara, a CG supervisor that works in a visual effects studio called One Of Us. She was able to show us the different workflows that’s centred around creature FX which is directly related to my apprenticeship in DNEG.

We briefly looked into the tools and workflows that are used in Maya to help add a level of realism by simulating certain elements such as hair, muscle, and a bit of cloth workflow on a walking animated fox cache that have been modelled, rigged and animated by artists working in One of Us.

Shotsculpt

One of the elements we looked at is the process of shotsculpt which looked at deforming certain poses using blendshapes and to fix or add volume/muscle structure onto a character. This is done by keying the specific frame of the sculpt and changing the influence of the float values from 0.000 to 1.000 on the level of influence onto the animated cache.

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Hair and Cloth

We also looked at the nucleus solver that drive the hair, cloth and other particle simulations in Maya for simulating the brows, whiskers and ears.