Cyd & Julie

From a real cat to a rigged character — across three style tiers

Visual development for an animated feature set during the London Blitz. The central challenge was translating a real tortoiseshell cat into an animated character that could work across multiple style registers, from storybook illustration to photorealistic CG, while keeping the tortoiseshell coat pattern consistent and recognizable throughout. The real Cyd's markings (the specific orange, black, and cream patchwork unique to tortoiseshells) became the north star.

I explored three distinct style tiers: a stylized animation look with big eyes and simplified forms for the main character design, a herringbone pattern variant that tested how far the fur pattern could be abstracted into a decorative motif while still reading as "tortoiseshell," and a photorealistic tier pushing toward lifelike rendering with detailed fur texture, realistic eye reflections, and natural lighting. Each tier had to maintain the same recognizable face and personality.

Consistency at scale came from a custom tortoiseshell LoRA I trained on the real Cyd, so every generation, across every style tier, inherited the same coat pattern instead of drifting shot to shot. The pattern work was especially iterative — I generated dozens of variations testing different levels of stylization, then animated the pattern-changing process itself to show how the design could shift between looks while holding the character's identity. The pipeline ended with a 16-emotion expression sheet, a 3D-printable model rigged with 760 bones in Blender, animated video tests in Runway Gen-4, and a full pitch deck.