In The Mill’s third collaboration with Barton F. Graf and Supercell, Hay Day’s beloved cast of characters makes its first-ever appearance in a fully CG 360º environment. Once again directed by Robert Sethi of Mill+, ‘360 Hug’ allows fans of the popular mobile game to get acquainted with the animals in a whole new way.
The challenging objectives artists faced whilst creating ‘360 Hug’ provided ample opportunities for the VFX team to come up with new ways to craft the intricate effects. An archetype of such can be seen in the creation of the cow’s kiss mark; 2D artists researched the perfect lips and solved how long they needed to stick to the camera before dissolving away. 2D Lead Artist Martin Karlsson says, “To create the piece we had to shift our mindset and reinvent how we thought and how we used our tools.”
3D Lead Artist Robert Chapman comments, “We love working on a good character piece, and we got our fair share to work on with a final total of twenty-five animals. The main thing we focused on for the characters was redoing the hair grooms with a tool we created in-house that we call ‘Furtalizer’. This enabled fast fur groom changes right inside of Maya.”
“We love the characters Supercell created,” Sethi says. “They are always so much fun to animate. We thoroughly enjoyed working and collaborating with Barton and Supercell again.”
Check out The Mill’s previous work with Hay Day here.