Furry Olympics Graphic and Stylized Furry Creatures Take Part in 2014 Qatar National Sports Day When we saw these joyfully active fur animals designed as idents for Qatar’s National Sports Day on Qatar TV, we just had to find out more about them. So we asked Qatar-based CG Generalist Alexander Zabei Vorota more about the making of the animations. ‘I used 3DsMax 2013 for this, the internal module Hair&Fur for the fur and the Vray Render engine for rendering,’ he told us. ‘I use mostly 3DsMax, but lately started to migrate to Houdini, because it gives me more freedom and speed in the creation of any kind of effect.’ We’re excited to see he will also be working on Qatar’s 2015 sports day idents, and he just finished working on the Nation Day 2014 ident, which involved massive fluid simulations and a lot of real life footages. Watch more dance movements: Alex kindly shared with us the process behind creating these lifelike, energetic creatures: • Firstly I imported motion capture files from a public Mocap library, sorting them out by sports category, and then cleaning them up. • After baking character meshes into point cache files, I developed some pretty basic scripts which allowed me to apply fur presets to multiple animated characters simultaneously. • The fur movements were following the movements of the characters automatically, due to the fur dynamics engine. The main ingredient was the correct scene scale, which I had set earlier, during the testing phase. • All characters were 175 cm tall; this is why the fur acts so realistically.
