My main focus on this show was to comp the physical interaction between Hugh Jackman and the CG sheep across a series of petting scenes — arguably the most contact-heavy and therefore most technically exposed work on the project.

Since the actor was performing against green stand-in proxies on set, the core challenge was making his hands genuinely appear to sink into dense, volumetric fleece rather than simply resting on a CG surface. Relying solely on traditional roto and keying would have left the contact feeling flat, so I approached the integration using Deep compositing* to properly manage the depth complexity of the wool volume. This allowed me to embed his fingers directly into the CG geometry and derive accurate micro-shadows and ambient occlusion at the precise contact points — giving the interaction physical weight from within the render, rather than painting it on top.

To address the mechanical deformation of the wool without heavily routing it back through the FX department, I handled the displacement myself in comp by extracting motion vectors from the actor’s hand movements to drive custom STMap distortions** directly onto the CG render, forcing the wool fibers to part and compress realistically under the pressure of his fingers. I then used GridWarpTracker, keyed to the specific contact areas, to animate the organic rebound of the fleece as his hand lifted — before closing out each shot with carefully tuned light wraps to unify the edges.

(*) A compositing workflow that stores pixel depth information per sample, enabling accurate layering of volumetric or intersecting CG elements that would otherwise be impossible to separate cleanly.

(**) An STMap (ST Map) is a UV-based distortion technique in Nuke that remaps pixel coordinates using a reference image — here driven by motion vector data to simulate physical deformation on a CG render without re-rendering.