Intro: A potential client who liked Squirrely wanted me to do a lobster in the same style for a commercial they were doing for a seafood restaurant. This is what we ended up with. Well, this is my version of the commercial at least (see below for details). The commercial was done to live action plates which I don't have so I just made some dummy ones for my animation of him.
What did I do?
Designed, Modeled, UV'd and did the facial rig/blendshapes for the delivered product. I set up some dummy textures and shaders as well as animated my own version of the commercial for my reel. The client ended up doing the animation, shader/texture and compositing in house for the commercial but were cool with my taking a stab at it for my personal work.
The body rig was done by my buddy David Bokser as well as the cloth sim for the apron of the commercial version. I pulled the apron for my test cause I'm not a cloth guy:)
Lessons Learned
Experimented with some new techniques on the facial rig (including sequential blend shapes). Very happy with the sealed lip control.
Discovered the limitations of blendshape facial rigs though was able to push things pretty far
