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I thought I’d write a quick blog about a drop-in I put together last week, to try to get back into the swing. We have a running joke that Jay’s cat, Bedalos, is smarter than any other pet in the world. This usually plays out by showing a popular internet clip featuring a pet doing something cute, like riding a Roomba. After the clip, Jay brags that Bedalos is much smarter, and we show a clip of a cat (actually an actor cat played by Zorro) doing something impossible.

This time, we showed a clip of a dog jumping into a pile of leaves and retrieving a ball. It takes the dog a while, and it’s a mess. Bedalos, on the other hand, runs off-screen and comes back with a leaf blower.

In order to achieve this, I first had to build a cat that looks like Zorro. I took some production stills of the cat, and using a 3D software package called Mudbox, sculpted and painted a computer-generated cat from a low-res, stock mesh.

Sculpting the cat

That done, I brought the model into Maya, and rigged the cat so I could animate it. A rig is a set of virtual bones that are connected to the 3D mesh. As the bones move, the cat model deforms like a real cat, or at least tries to approximate that movement. The rig also features a system of control bones and curves that allow you to move the bones around in a simplified way, much like you would a clay model or other figure used in stop-motion animation.

The cat is rigged for animation

Next, I used the color of the cat to give it fur. I added the ability to control the exposure and lights to the camera, which would simplify making the cat look like it belonged outside in the sun with Jay.

An early pass at the fur

Next, I found a photo of a backpack leaf blower on Amazon.com, and used it as a basis to build a virtual one. Since I wasn’t doing any close-ups and the leaf blower is made of plastic, I didn’t have to do any complicated texturing or materials to sell the audience on the idea that this was a real leaf blower. Plus, a cat-sized leaf blower is going to look like a toy, so there’s that.

The toy leaf blower

Now it was time to shoot the bit. I gave away the storyboards I drew while I was planning the shots with our cameraman, so I don’t have them to show you here. Suffice it to say they consisted of a series of cuts that would allow us to switch from the real cat to the CG version.

We went out to the grassy knoll on the NBC lot. If you look at the segment, then look back at some old episodes of Laugh-In, you’ll see it’s the same place, only the trees are newly-planted on that show.

Jay lets the cat wranglers do their work

We needed real leaves (which you have to buy, it turns out), and someone to blow them away. Our special effects team brought along an enormous rig that a child could use as a jetpack. There were two actor cats, which makes sense when you figure even the most cooperative is still a cat. The wranglers used treats to get the cats to focus on their marks, and little buzzers that they could plant next to the treat and activate when we called “action.”

Still, the cat was unable to carry the ball in its mouth, so that became another effect I would have to do.

Things went pretty well. We shot with Jay for about 20 minutes, then did a few pickup shots with the cat in another 15 minutes. We shot close-ups of the ball <i>in situ<i> for the added effects shots, and that was it.

The cat and leaf blower models connected up

Back on the computer, I placed the leaf blower on the cat, and constrained it to the cat rig so it could be moved with the animation controls and would look more natural. I imported the footage for the leaf blower shot into Maya and positioned the camera so the ground plane in the shot matched the one in the software. I had build the cat to scale, so it was the right size already. Now all I had to do was animated the cat walking in, and blowing the leaves away in a fashion that matched the way the special effects guys had done it in the shot.

(It had taken about 35 seconds for the leaves to blow off the ball, so I sped up the shot by about 3 times, and even used that sped-up audio because it matched the toy-sized cat leaf blower)

I rendered the cat separately from the background, and did a simple, shadows-only pass to give me better control over the lighting when I composited the shot together.

The rest you can see in the final clip, below. The prep time for this bit was about a day, and the shoot and final was another 4-5 hours (the ball-in-the-cat’s mouth took about 15 minutes, right at the end). The writing on this gag was a team effort, so credit is due to John Melendez and Rob Young.

It got big laughs. Also, this CG cat is going to come in handy, since we will use it in next week’s “Cop N Kitty” segment for a shot where the cat dives off a building and kills a criminal.

Now the cat looks off to new horizons of leaf blowing.