Le Touquet City Hall
For the centennial re-opening of Le Touquet City Hall, scheduled for June 27, I was commissioned to reimagine and animate Caddy—the city’s historic mascot—for a short film to be screened during the event. This film would narrate the building’s key historical milestones while introducing Caddy as a modern, expressive storyteller that bridges the past and the future.
Client
le touquet city municipality
Year
2025
Category
Motion
tools
3ds max+ Wan ai render
///The creative goal was to evolve the iconic Caddy silhouette into a fully realized 3D character while preserving its symbolic essence. I began by hand-sketching a new version of the Caddy logo, one that incorporated a facial expression—a significant departure from the faceless official version. This sketch established the emotional tone and personality of the character, setting the foundation for the mascot’s animated journey. The concept centered on capturing a warm, playful spirit that resonates with both the town’s identity and its people.
/// Using Flux AI within ComfyUI, I generated multiple style studies and emotional variations based on my initial sketch. Once the design language and expression were locked in, I rendered multiple views (front, side, back) of the character to train a LoRA model for stylistic consistency. I then transitioned into 3D using Hunyuan 3D 2.5, which allowed me to build a fully controllable model with proper proportions, posing, and surface detail. After refining the mesh, I imported it into Autodesk 3ds Max, where I built a custom rig tailored to Caddy’s structure and animated a series of performance gestures for use in AI-assisted motion tools like Wan2.1 AI ControlNet.
/// One key challenge was maintaining character continuity across radically different tools—from 2D sketching to AI stylization, and finally 3D modeling. AI tools provided expressive power but lacked visual coherence across outputs. The absence of a face in the original logo also meant that I had to carefully invent new facial features that felt both authentic and emotionally compelling—without straying too far from the town’s established identity.
/// The addition of a hand-drawn expressive face early in the process gave the entire pipeline a strong visual anchor. By training a custom LoRA model on the generated styles and poses, I was able to guide AI rendering tools to produce coherent outputs that matched the spirit of the sketch. Rigging the final 3D model in 3ds Max allowed for precise animation control, giving Caddy a life-like presence as he joyfully waves his flag, carries his golf bag, and warmly welcomes the citizens of Le Touquet to their newly reopened city hall.
