Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 26, 2015. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The advertising agency first approached us in 2011 with a request for a blue 3D coati that was to be placed in various poses for print advertising. After an initial estimate of the effort, things initially went quiet around the project. It would take another two years before the client picked the project up again.
After various concept studies of a coati with a scientist’s coat, the decision was made against a coat after all, which reassured us. Cloth simulations over Hair would have been difficult to realize at the time because of possible intersections, since hair cannot serve as collision objects for the coat – unless it were converted into geometry (which would probably have become a dynamics-collision nightmare). An alternative would have been to let the hair grow only in the places not covered by the coat. But this would have become fiddly masking work with many test renderings. These potential problems were eliminated by doing without a coat.
Once the contractual matters had been settled, we began with the coati’s T-pose, with the agency delighting us with beautiful concepts and perspective drawings in T-pose. The coati naturally underwent several more changes over the course of production.
