At Animal we were asked to make a talking fish on a two week turnaround from shoot to final. As VFX supe I decided the only way to hit that deadline was to use a 1:1 stand in. That way framing and movement could be approved in the edit. We just had to worry about the whole talking fish bit.
The sun position had changed so much in between shooting the reference plate and the rest of the spot we just replaced the water.
To make the fish stand in I opted to cut our CG fish asset into articulated segments and 3D print them.
Detail view of the ball and socket joints.
Keeping it matte gray so we can use it fora lighting reference. You can also see I used a bike inner tube as a swim bladder so I could change the buoyancy quickly on set. The left over rubber made up the fins.
Pictured is the live-link mocap pipeline I built. It starts off with an iphone app based on FaceCaptureX , and feeds live into C4D with a plugin that can playback, record, and mix takes. It also has tools for mapping the blendshapes or using the blendshape data with traditional rigs. (In the background CG Lead Lenny Wilson)