Making of “Short and Sweet” Maxon's holiday animation pays tribute to vintage stop-motion.
Who doesn’t love a yeti? This year for the Holidays, Maxon is sharing a short but sweet looping animation of a determined little fuzzball trying to lift a big snowball. The character, animation, and environment were all produced in-house by artists Ian Robinson (@IRSculpts) and Daniel Hashimoto, also known as Hashi (@ActionMovieDad), in just under two weeks.
“Leo Hageman, our head of Creative, floated the idea of producing a holiday image or animation of an abominable snow critter—an adorable yeti inspired by Rankin Bass stop motion,” Hashi recalls. Both Ian and Hashi grew up loving those nostalgic felt-and-wire-characters from Rankin Bass Holiday specials, so the challenge instantly clicked. The concept also gave a nod to Robinson’s work from the previous year, when he built a “Snowman Making Kit” for a livestream with Perception. The idea quickly evolved to combine the previous assets as a cameo alongside a brand new sculpt.
Hashi sketched out a rough animatic of a little yeti building a snowman, but when the head falls off, the creature gets stuck in a loop, continuously fixing it. Ian then jumped straight into ZBrush to sculpt the yeti. In just one day, he presented a sculpt for review, and after one round of feedback, he delivered the completed Yeti to Hashi the very next day – a full five days ahead of schedule! Reflecting on the speed of the turnaround, Ian said, “I mentioned to some friends that I designed and sculpted a character for a cute little thing we’re doing at work earlier this week, and I got it knocked out in two days. They were like ‘you finished a character in two days?!’”
In addition to natural talent and the skill he’s honed over the last decade with ZBrush, Ian was armed with some amazing improvements in ZBrush that make the handover to Cinema 4D even cleaner and easier than before. “Being able to retopo directly inside of ZBrush made it ideal to complete an animation-ready model and handover to another artist in the pipeline,” he explains.
Hashi was able to send the geometry directly from ZBrush to Cinema 4D with a single click using the “GoZ” button. “Ian got me the yeti early, allowing me to spend the weekend idly tinkering with how I’d approach the rigging and texturing,” he says. “I’d previously done a Rankin Bass style stop motion insert for our ‘But With Raptors’ account - but using Cinema 4D’s Standard Renderer. This time, I wanted it to be up close, and take full advantage of Redshift materials and lighting to create a stop motion character that looked like real needled felt and fur over an armature.”
Hashi gathered photo references, then clone-stamped a pressed felt pattern across the yeti’s body in the desired colors. To give the fur its dimensional look, he combined two systems: displaced geometry and hair simulation. “I made a duplicate of the body geometry, then applied a custom wispy felt material, a fibrous pattern that would draw its color from the reference body below. The layer has transparency between the hairs and fibers, and a Redshift displacement tag that pushes out the geometry in a lumpy bumpy way from the original body in every direction, casting small shadows and adding depth to the surface.” The hair simulation consisted of two patches: body fur and the arms and head hair, both also sampled from the base body color.
The 30,000 body hairs were curled and clumped tight to the body, creating the look of individual fibers that occasionally break the surface and weave back in. The head and arms were covered with 20,000 hairs groomed to look like trimmed fur. “I was able to use a relatively small number of hairs, imagining that, as a real stop motion puppet, he’d be about six to eight inches tall.”
The facial rig was kept intentionally simple, with just enough blend shapes to support the expressions featured in the short clip. One standout was a “cartoon smile” shape that, when dialed up, replaced the individual teeth with a full-toothed grin to make him look embarrassed at one point.
For motion reference, Hashi filmed himself performing a version of the actions, re-timed them to feel “stop motion-y” in After Effects, and placed the result on a 2D card in Cinema 4D to mimic the actions. “I’m not a character animator, but I can fake it sometimes with good reference or motion capture. In this case it was all hand-keyframed animation applied to the rig in a process that was pretty much roto-mation.”
The environment consisted of a sky stamped with procedurally generated ‘Metaball’ cloud shapes stylized and arranged in Photoshop. The trees were made of modular cloned discs scalloping into a cone covered with a similar cheated felt pattern. The final render of the combined layers was completed in After Effects, using Supercomp to blend the colors and light wrap things together. The clean animation was produced at 24fps with no motion blur. The animation was then selectively posterized to replicate a range of 12-18fps for the stop motion look. Universe Retrograde gave the entire image a vintage film tinting, plus realistic film grain and damage.
The team is proud of how the final result came together so well and so quickly in this showcase of the tools in Maxon One working as a start-to-finish pipeline. More than that, though, it’s a lovely little homage to the nostalgic filmmaking processes that created vintage holiday classics. What are you creating this season? Follow, and share your fun projects and art with us!