CG horsing around

Here's a brief clip of our current CG horse tech at Weta Digital. I built this digital animal last year utilising reference captured at Massey University's Equine Veterinary lab... It took a few months to put together and is a bit of a snapshot of the current state of our deformation technologies for muscle, fat and skin simulation. Some derivatives of this piece can be seen in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and of course our upcoming The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and it's other two parts.

I worked on the digital double horses and riders for The Two Towers and The Return Of the King and it was a privilege to be making our new horse far, far more detailed this time around.

Take a look: [the clip has been edited and excludes the fascia, fat and under skin layers sadly].

-j

UPDATE: there's now a story on the stuff.co.nz site about it and Abraham Lincoln etc... plus I just listened to a review on National Radio about Chris Rogers' involvement in working with us. Chris was in charge of the team we worked with to gather the reference and was not afraid to put a horse on a treadmill at the drop of a hat ;-)