Cinesite had previous experience with CGI dogs from Underdog and Beverly Hills Chihuahua, but recent film Marmaduke required some extra work due to the many closeups and wide variety of breeds. Over at FiredByDesign, they discuss how they created the various faces.
Cinesite used a hybrid technique which involved combining fully textured and lit CG passes with parts of the original photography re-projected over the animated geometry. To create the CG faces of the different canine characters, Matt’s team built base head models in Autodesk Maya using photographic references of the dog actors. Blend shapes based on individual muscle shapes were then integrated into the rig using in-house tools.
