The Cocopops Puppetboy was again something I joined part way in. I’d been working on Jamesons until the story boards and mocap had been finished. It then became my responsibility to sculpt, UV and texture the boy, texture, shade and light all the pops, environment and the boy, break out and manage the renders and then composite the lot.

There’s an interesting story about this project. All but the very first Moons and Stars adverts had been rendered with Pixars Renderman for Maya but for this job it proved impractical, even after a new build of Renderman done especially for us by Pixar.  So while Paul C wrangled the mocap and animated the other 90% in Maya, Rich B did the intial setup, cameras and landscape proxies in Maya .. the final render, including the hundreds of thousands of high poly, displaced, normal mapped, lit cocopops were rendered quickly and with very little fuss in Lightwave.

I wrote up the full story for Newtek Europe which they presented on their website and used for promotion and marketing at the various software shows in the States and Europe!