Reference

First, the FooMojo art team thoroughly researches the pet breed, studying reference websites, books, artwork, photographs, and even real live pets. The goal is to become familiar with the intricate details of how the animal behaves and the breed’s physical characteristics: body and appendage proportions, coloring and fur texture, special markings, eye shapes and colors, the paws, the nose, even the inside of the mouth, etc. They will use reference material throughout the various creation stages.

Modeling

Next, a FooMojo modeler will start with a 3D box constructed of a wireframe mesh of connected points, and shape it into a pet. Think of it as digital clay. Using reference material, an image of the animal is projected in the background to help form the proper bodily proportions.

When shaping the 3D box, a process called box modeling, 22,000 faces (or sides) are manipulated to create contour of the pet. Each tiled area is called a polygon. The artist will pay close attention to the structure of the body and proportions of the limbs.

UV Creation (2D layout of the model)

The shaped model is then changed into a 2D image by slicing it from the nose to the tail, opening up the ‘skin’ and flattening it out – essentially resembling a bearskin rug. Once the image is flattened, the artist makes sure that the proportions are maintained to preserve the resolution of the texture. This is then used later in the paint process, using reference material to accurately add color and fur patterns as well as eye shadow, nail color, etc. Even though the 2D image is flat, it corresponds directly with the 3D model.  Once the artist is done, the paint will serve as a base for the pet’s color. The next step is to add hair.  With a click of a button, 22,000 guide hairs will literally pop out of the 3D model, corresponding polygon points.

Styling

To style the Guide Fur, which at this stage looks very much like a porcupine, the artist will comb and style the guide hairs to length and direction of the breed’s natural fur. Once the guide hairs are properly combed, each guide hair is interpolated across the polygonal model to fill in the appropriate number of real hairs to cover the pet.  Hair is added in layers. Each added layer creates more opacity for all the layers, giving a softer, more natural appearance of really fine hair resembling the fuzzy fur of puppies and kittens.

Typically, a FooPet will end up with around 200,000 – 700,000 individual hairs, depending on the breed. Our most recent Abyssinian has four layers of hair and nearly one million hairs total.

Now the pet looks proportionally correct and covered in fur, but appears in gradients of gray.  It’s time to paint the fur.

Painting

Painting is the most critical step. Using the UV creation, three layers of paint are applied to the skin, root fur, and tip fur. To do this, the artist will project images onto the model. Using 2D and 3D paint tools, texture is added. A high-resolution UV map carries more detail in places like the face and ears where the skin paint is more visible than the hairier areas. Then, tools are used to hand paint fixes and apply touch ups.

The root fur is painted darker to simulate the idea of shadowing. The Tip Fur is usually lighter and more true to what you see on a real pet. Our artists will blend the root and the tip coloring on a single strand of fur to simulate real pet hair. If you take a piece of fur from a pet, you will notice the color change from the root to the tip. Each hair on a FooPet is multicolored just like real animals.

Lighting

The paint and the lighting are interdependent of each other, just worked on in stages. The paint and fur are created with saturation of color for the intended lighting. The lighting is then tweaked to optimize the paint and fur to achieve the desired look. At this time, a lot of energy is put in the eyes (shininess, shape, color, expression of the eyes), and overall lifelikeness of the face.

Now we have a finished statue, but next we bring it to life.

Rigging

Rigging is typically done at the same time as the UV creation. Our rigging artist will add 300 bones minimum to the model, paying close attention to ensure that the joints are placed anatomically correct in order to re-create the motion of the animal accurately.

The model sculpt is bound or weighted to the skeleton joints. The skeleton is then layered with control curves, which the animator can pick in 3D space to translate, rotate, scale, and manipulate custom controllers to achieve different poses. The rigs are layered with extra helper controls like constraints and inverse kinematics so the animators can lock paws to the ground, align the eyes to a focal point, or keep a shoulder or hip aligned to another part of the body without having to hand key every single frame. As much of this process is encapsulated in scripting so the animation and rig data can be shared from pet to pet.

Animation

The animation data brings the personality and realism to life. FooMojo’s animation artists will use reference material to recreate the motion of the animal, stylizing as needed to simulate natural realistic movement. The animators generate libraries of poses and animation to ensure that the transitions between different actions of the pet are as seamless as possible, and to reuse poses as staring points for new animation.

Render

Rendering a FooPet can be quite time consuming, especially since rendering and lighting go hand in hand. Both need to work together simultaneously to ensure the proper coloring and effect of the pet.  After the lighting has been submitted to the 3D scene, the data is submitted to the render farm.

The model sculpt geometry is smoothed out at render time using mathematical algorithms that are in the render software called subdivision surface routines. These routines effectively quadruple the number of faces in the polygonal mesh that are seen by the camera during rendering. Consider the polygon count for the render is between 3.5 million triangles. What does that mean? The artist will smooth out the edges of the FooPet for a natural look, which takes a lot of time!

e.g. The fur is between 3 – 10 polygons per hair with 200,000 – 500,000 hairs + 1 million for the underlying skin of the pet  = 6 million polygons. A render with this many polygons on a single machine takes about 5 – 220 minutes to render with 6,000 frames (100 – 200 animation clips). Time =62,000 hours / 24 hours = 250 days divided by 2 as we run two processes per machine = 125 days.

At FooPets, we have dozens of machines to help expedite this process into 2 ½ days! This environment of servers is called a render farm. Talk about processing power!

Sound

Sound is then added to give the final touch of realism that brings these pets to life. Recorded clips of food pouring and collected reference audio are cut to create short clips that are carefully synchronized with the rendered animation.

That’s how we do it! We hope you enjoyed this overview of how we make FooPets. You can download free Desktop Wallpaper of the Abyssinian showcased in this article.