FUR REAL.(TV commercial featuring computer generated panda bear)(Technology Information)

Digital groomers style a new coat for a panda model

The commercial is anything but subtle. Footage of various endangered species flashes across the TV screen as Bob Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm" plays in the background. While the announcer explains how viewers can help protect these species by making contributions to the World Wildlife Fund, the scene cuts to a small cluster of bamboo trees, where a panda bear walks across the frame as a large contribution envelope falls to the ground. The bear then takes cover inside the envelope, curls up, and peacefully goes to sleep.

Although the commercial's message is simple and direct, the process of creating the 60-second spot, titled "Panda Bear," was quite the opposite. "Technologically, this was the most challenging project I've worked on," says David Shirk, animation supervisor at Quiet Man, the New York City facility that created the CG spot for The Plowshare Group agency (Stamford, CT). "Even as far as computer graphics technology has come, creating fur in the computer is still a technical hurdle that's larger than any I've dealt with so far in my 15-year career."

According to Shirk, it was impossible for a live panda bear to be used in this commercial. Not only would it have been difficult to train a panda to crawl into a large envelope and pretend to fall asleep, but using the animal in such a way would have been unacceptable to the client. "The World Wildlife Fund has a tremendous amount of sensitivity regarding animals, especially endangered ones," Shirk says. In fact, he adds, this might be why the client and agency asked Quiet Man to model the bear in a slightly stylized fashion, rather than aim for true photorealism.

Skin and Bones

Although the bear is somewhat stylized, that didn't mean the Quiet Man team could take short-cuts when modeling, texturing, animating, and lighting the animal's pelt. On the contrary, the panda's fur had to be generated so that it moved realistically, as though it were part of the skin to which it was attached. "We've faked fur in the past by using a 2D cheat--essentially, by creating 2D texture maps of fur" Shirk admits. Employing this trick on "Panda Bear" was out of the question, however, because it was necessary for the animal to be viewed from all sides. "He turns completely around in one shot, so there was no way we could use that 2D short-cut," Shirk says. "Plus, the fur had to be an organic part of the character so that viewers would accept it."

Realizing the technical challenges that lay ahead, Shirk and the team first studied reference footage of pandas, then Shirk sketched pandas until he got a sense of how they move, how their musculature works, and how the muscles move under their hide. Next, he built a polygonal model of the panda's skeleton and skin in Avid's Softimage 3D and conducted several animation tests in the software, all the while tweaking the skeleton and skin whenever the character's movement appeared awkward. The animator Says it was important that he develop the panda's skeleton and skin simultaneously because the skeleton is what drives the panda's motion, but the interaction between the panda's skeleton and skin defines what viewers see.