Seriously good fur

CGI Squirrel

Fur. It's hard to model in CGI. For a start, it's not one object but hundreds or thousands or millions of them. To make them convincing you have to model them; understanding how they move relative to each other, and to the animal or human that they're attached to

And then there's the lighting. The triumphantly gorgeous CGI tiger in the Life of Pi had a complex lighting model that took into account the way that light scatters differently on the layers of hair that surround the big cats.

So this short film is more ambitious than it seems. Not only did the creators watch real squirrels obsessively, but they've modelled the fur almost to perfection: there were over six million hairs in this animated squirrel.

And notice how they've used motion blur. So much so that it was really difficult to get a sharp screen shot!

Credits:
Director boutiq: Mike Huber
Production Company: boutiq
Producer: Florian Liertz
DoP: Tobias Dengler
3D Artists: Semir Saleh, Bahar Öner, Chris Hempel
3D Animation: Adrian Suter
Compositing: Adrian Suter, Pascal Schelbli
Composer: Bernd Klanke
Sound Design: Bernd Klanke
Agency: Inflagranti
CD: Lorenz Killer
Consultant: Lorenz Schmid
Client: Hauert