The Mill create CG baby

The Mill's 3D department have used their expertise to create a totally computer generated animating baby for German building Society Badenia's latest commercial.
The spot is based on a baby inside its mother's womb, who is momentarily disturbed by a noise outside. The noise prompts the baby to knock on the wall of the womb, as a signal to quieten things down 'out there'. Titled 'Baby', the commercial was directed at production company As If Film Matters, for German agency Jung von Matt.
The process began with the initial modelling carried out by Thomas Pastor and Yann Mabille. The initial difficulty here being to model a baby that uniformly everybody would agree looked real and cute. Once the modelling was completed Thomas and Yann began work on the texturing. With the intention of using camera mapping techniques, a new born baby was photographed from head to toe. Using these real textures the CG baby's skin had a very real look of pigmentation and colouring.
Running parallel to the texturing process, the animation team lead by Rob Van Den Bragt, began the process of firstly rigging the character and then creating an animation animatic to block out the story.
Van Den Bragt also began working on a technique to allow The Mill to create the final rendered look. Using actual reference photo's of a baby in the womb, he created a look using a sub surface scattering technique, giving the picture real depth, and using layers such a peach fur pass, he was able to generate a look that gave the illusion of real light fall-off over the model.
Softimage XSI was used for the modeling and texturing, and then the animation, lighting and rendering were done in Maya using Mental Ray.
Finally, all the CG passes were composited and finessed in flame, by Mill flame artist Justin Bromley, who also worked on enhance the glow surrounding the baby.
(GB)