Beverly Hills Chihuahua
Beverly Hills Chihuahua, a box office hit in the US in 2008, utilised Cinesite’s groundbreaking, proprietary talking muzzle pipeline which uses in-house tools to keep our 2D pipeline as flexible as possible. Using this system, we completed over 700 shots for the film.
Our tool allowed us to paint up still frames taken from the original photography and re-project these over the 3D model through the course of the shot. This effectively meant we could change any aspect of the facial expression in the original photography and manipulate the live action textures without the need to send them back through the 3D render stage of the pipeline.
On many occasions, the behaviour of the dog in the original photography would contradict with the requirements of the final animated version. An example of this would be if a dog was barking, panting or licking their muzzle. Whilst plates were being tracked, the 2D department started on the process of clean up, which involved the removal of the dog’s existing jaw. Live action was filmed in the heat of Mexico and often, dogs were panting, with their lower jaws hanging open.
We used a variety of 2D techniques, however the most useful of these was an in-house tracking tool based on motion warping technology. With this tool we created neck patches by tracking in painted fur textures, derived from the original photography.
Muzzles were created for eleven different breeds of dog and the finished results are seamless.
