Set in a mythological, fantasy landscape the film’s unlikely hero is cast out by his unicorn peers. He strives to run faster than they can fly which causes his body to transform. He bursts into the modern day, revealing himself as a natural born racehorse running in The Crabbie’s Grand National.

The technique used for Grand National was a combination of 3D Characters with Matte Painted environments. We approached the characters in a traditional 3D way, modeled and rigged in 3Ds Max, using our in-house rigging pipeline. We also used one of the new features of 3Ds Max 2015 called Dual Quaternion Skinning. This allowed us to preserve the volume of the mesh, for our complex horse and unicorn anatomy. Ontop of the animation, we added extra simulation for the muscle structure to accentuate natural horse movements. We used Hair Farm and rendered the hair, however we did not use a simulation but animated the hair by hand for better control, especially in the flying unicorn sequences.

For the environment we decided to go with a Camera Projection technique, which allows us to project the matte paintings onto 3D geometry. Having a 2D aesthetic gave us more creative freedom for the fantastical world we tried to create, while having the depth and scope of a 3D environment.