Car Fox
Animation and cloth work on the infamous fox mascot
I was based in Chicago and I was sent to the LA base to help the team out with my more generalist focused skillset. I covered the areas where I could, layout, lineups, animation and building the cloth rigs for his little clothes.
The commercials were pretty factory-line in design. A series of comedic straight-to-camera pieces and we would place the carfox into the shots. Sometimes he was there and then when the ad aired, he’d be removed.
The redacted faces skit was the first set of ads I worked on with the LA team. We were all transplants, the crew were mostly freelance animators. This was way back in the summer of 2018. A lot changed since then. I moved to LA the next summer, I had a wonderful 9 months before the pandemic arrived and the world ended.
CFX Workflow
These were part of my cloth/cfx QCing work. I went into all the shots, created preroll and then ran the cloth simulations with my own custom cfx rig.
I made a CFX wiki doc and sent it to the LA team who would inevitably have to pick up and run the shots that required animation fixes or small alterations. CFX can be a little black box so this guide was a step by step process to load in the CFX rig, connect it, run it and also what to look for should something break. I included my scripts and a troubleshooting section to furth help.
I’ve always enjoyed documenting my workflows and ideas, I believe that if you can share your workflow it does mean you understand it and I suppose that’s the first step on the road to becoming a senior, dependable artist in the industry.
The cfx workflow requires broad knowledge, I wanted the rig to be semi-automated so I updated the animation rig with a few custom groups, and used the geo from the model publish to create the low-resolution simulation geos. It was connected via blendshapes which is great QC because if the model is updated, you will quickly find out when connecting the cfx rig.