Working with The Marketing Store we were tasked with a challenging brief: re-create the Happy character to a photorealistic standard, and provide them the assets to use happy as a straight 'out of the box' animation solution. You can see one of our test animations going through its paces above... This meant we had to provide an easy to use, pose-able model that would also render flawlessly, and be simple enough to distribute with only minimal documentation. We did, and it’s been very pleasing to see the little fella keep popping up in the most unusual of places since then... For the more technically minded, this meant producing a packaged up maya file with no plugin use and no comp on the render - ie. all passes were directly 'comped' in-render (Mental Ray) with an animator-proof rig. We also produced an extremely detailed set of print resolution assets for a brand spanking new happy meal box, and various in-store and out of store merchandising imagery. Have a squizz at the images above to see them in all their glory.