Desi – Mascot for Desical
Client work for Desical, 2025 – modelling, rigging and animation in Cinema 4D, rigs with Mixamo, rendered with Octane Render, compositing in After Effects.
About the project
This client project from 2025 was commissioned by Desical, a brand of Hufgard GmbH for barn hygiene – mainly bedding powders for dairy and cattle barns. Together with the client, I developed a mascot: Desi, a young cow.
For a while, Desi appeared on Instagram. In short clips she explained products and how they work or shared useful tips around the barn – with her own voice, facial expressions and gestures.
Technique
I built Desi in Cinema 4D using box modelling: starting from a simple cube, I shaped the body, arms, legs and head step by step by extruding, adding edge loops and working symmetrically. A HyperNURBS (Subdivision Surface) smooths the coarse polygon mesh into the character's soft, rounded forms. Desi was then given an animatable rig; Mixamo rigs served as the basis, allowing me to blend between their motions.
The facial animation runs on Pose Morph tags. The voice was generated with AI text-to-speech, and I manually matched the blend shapes for mouth and expressions in the Morph tag. Rendering was done with Octane Render, and the compositing into the live-action footage in After Effects.
More stills
