Labor of love: The Mill delivers a stylized virtual baby for a European TV commercial.(Broadcast)

Using Maya and Softimage|XSI, artists at The Mill created an idealized model of a fetus inside its mother's womb. The model (inset) consisted of 21,000 polygons prior to the application of subdivision surfaces. Camera-projected 2D photographic textures, augmented with a procedural surface, gave the skin a natural appearance.

There are times when our perception of reality becomes "more real" to us than itself. This was the contradiction confronting the digital artists at The Mill when they created a computer-generated fetus to star in an all-CG television commercial for the German building society Badenia. To illustrate the point that Badenia will protect and care ...