Stanley 3D Animation
The brief:
Vitality wanted their mascot Stanley the daschund to be able to work in a digital
environment. They wanted to create a realistic 3D animated version of Stanley who
could be directed to mimic certain actions that the “real” Stanley wouldn’t be able to.
Our challenge:
Creating a realistic 3D animal is always a challenge. The main challenge was to
firstly create a life like 3D exoskeleton which was based on the existing real life
Stanley. Once this was done the other challenges were matching his colour, fur
texture, his walking gait and his head movements to make them as realistic as
possible. As the dog was not available to us, we had a limited amount of assets to
work from including some video clips and pictures.
Our solution:
By researching many videos of daschunds, how they move, walk, run, blink and even
sniff our animators worked tirelessly to create a dog that would be difficult to tell
apart from the real thing.
Using the latest animation techniques they were able to create a dog that could
pretty much do anything that was required of it, from playing with various balls, to
wagging its tail, sitting, begging and even licking the camera. You can see our Stanley
at many Premiership football and rugby grounds as he trots across the LED screens
advertising Vitality.
