Starting with the mouse i put on the stage where Saschka has stopped with the shading an compositing of the clay look of the characters. I experimented in early stages with mudbox and the sculp features. but finally introduced Crazybump at Studio Soi. Crazybump a shareware tool in which i gathered good experiences during my last jobs in particular when it comes to create fine surface details and faking surface structure, where displacement wouldn't been worth the effort for that purpose. This program had so far some really useful algorythms to enhance surface details and to prelight textures for: Displacement, Normals, Occlusion and Specular.

Especially the Occlusion and Specular features where at the end wery helpful to create a haptic Clay-look of the surface and to emphasize the GI and Ollusion effect for the fine details.

Mudbox itself was for us also a good support in Painting, we actually used it only for surface texturing. with it's well enhanced OpenGL features it gave us a good feedback for all the surface features and enabled us to paint the texture in several different layers before composing it through Photoshop and then processing the bump texture through Crazybump.

When creating the Crazybump surface details, it caused a little problem with the texture seeds. Because crazybump doesn't know anything about seems, so i had to care of, that the Pixels in the texture outside the Seams wouldn't have too much dropofffs that they would bleed into the texture. So i used the Photosop Plugin "Solidify B" from: Flaming Pear (#Free Plugins).

With all these three tools I created the tectures for all the Hero characters except the Gruffalo: Mouse, Snake, Fox, Squirrels, Paddok, Frogs.

Especially the Paddock and Frogs got lots of Fans during the production, due to their very unique Look:


Finally you can read more Making of's here:

http://www.studiosoi.com/blog/der-gruffeloadventskalendercountdown-21/
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/animationsfilm-strichweise-heiter-1.955299
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/shorts/the-making-of-the-gruffalo.html
http://www.studiosoi.com/blog/the-final-gruffeloadventskalendercountdown-merry-christmas-everyone/