3D cat in the advertisement of the real estate company

This commercial for a real estate company is built around a fully CG cat — a ginger tabby that sits upright on a railing in a snowy street, phone in paw, dropped into live-action plates. Character modeling, rigging, fur grooming, animation, lighting and compositing all carry the shot, and Terminal FX’s work on the spot sits in our commercial and advertising portfolio.

A photoreal animal in a live-action ad leaves nowhere to hide. The coat has to survive daylight: guide hairs groomed so the fur breaks, clumps and catches rim light the way a real one does, then lit to match the sun, haze and colour of the plate. The animation has to stay inside a cat’s actual anatomy while carrying human intent, because a performance that reads as a costume kills the joke. Compositing then has to marry the render to the camera — matching grain and lens defocus, planting contact shadows on the railing, and holding fur edges against a bright background. That kind of close, unglamorous integration work is the core of what we do in character animation and commercial visual effects.