McDonalds

McDonald’s gave us something to get our teeth into. Working with the Marketing Store, we were asked to recreate Happy the ‘Happy Meals’ character to a photorealistic standard, together with assets that enabled him to be used as an ‘out of the box’ animation.

We developed an easy-to-use, poseable model that was capable of being rendered flawlessly, and which could be distributed with minimal documentation. He’s been popping up all over the place ever since. Not least, in an extremely intricate set of print assets for a brand new Happy Meal box, supported by a feast of in-store and out-of-store merchandising imagery.

In technical terms, bringing Happy to life meant producing an animator proof, neatly packaged, Maya file with no plug-in requirements and no comp required on the render: all passes were ‘comped’ in render.