Building Captain Itch: Designing a Character-Led CGI Campaign with Unreal Engine

Introduction

Big Flea is a character-led CGI campaign for Elanco's Advantage Spot On flea treatment, commissioned by MBC and creatively led by Roshan Kapoor. Directed by Antonio Milo at SuperBlimp, the film brought together custom creature design, hand-keyed character animation, Houdini grooming, and an Unreal Engine rendering pipeline in service of a stylised domestic comedy about a parasite that has moved in and made itself at home.

This breakdown follows the project from Captain Itch's character design through animation, grooming, Unreal Engine rendering, and final delivery, showing how three specialist teams contributed to one coherent film.

The Brief, in Short

The creative ambition was to speak to a more visually literate generation of pet parents, drawing on the energy of contemporary stylised animation rather than falling back on the category's usual clinical tone. The pitch, creatively led by Roshan at MBC, was to reframe the parasite as a character: a freeloader who moves into the home and refuses to leave.

From the SuperBlimp side, the direction was to lean into a hyper stylised approach rather than a more realistic one, giving us room to push caricature without tipping into uncanny. Captain Itch is anatomically plausible enough to feel wrong in a living room, cartoon enough to carry comic timing and a real performance.

Designing Captain Itch

Character development started in concept exploration, looking for a silhouette that would read across formats and a stance that carried personality. Big eyes. A slouch. Bristled limbs. A face that's somehow both menacing and slightly pathetic. Because the campaign depends on the flea feeling memorable rather than merely unpleasant, Captain Itch became the creative centre of gravity for the entire film.

The sculpt was built in ZBrush, with topology optimised in Maya for animation deformation. Texturing and shading were done in-house at SuperBlimp, with iridescent accents across the carapace and a restrained surface treatment to avoid over-styling. The goal at every stage was to keep the character grounded enough to feel like a real intruder in a domestic space, while leaving room for the grooming and lighting layers to push the final look toward the stylised realism the film called for.

The character was designed to travel beyond a single shot. Key frame, campaign still, social cutdown, future extension. The silhouette had to read at any scale.

Animation and Pipeline (Encounter Studio)

The most challenging part of creating the animatic was to tell the story as efficiently as possible, as we had a lot of action that needed to happen in a short space of time. We approached this by using clear staging, stylised animation, and always looking for the simplest solutions. We handled the cat design in multiple phases, using a combination of 3D sculpts and 2D drawings to achieve the final design.

We worked closely with Argentum to achieve an appealing look for the groom, aiming for a combination of stylised realism and caricatured charm. Using Maya for rigging and animation allowed us to make full use of our in-house toolset, helping us move quickly without compromising quality.

Andrew Bashforth handled rigging, building the rigs procedurally to ensure a consistent rig architecture across each character and allowing animation to begin early, while still giving the client room to continue reviewing character designs throughout production, right up until final render. Daniel Crook led the character animation, working closely with the director to develop performance across every beat.

Once animation was approved, we exported the final caches via an Alembic pipeline to Unreal Engine for rendering. In parallel, we worked closely with the groom department at Argentum, providing shot-specific sculpts and corrective shapes to help refine and elevate the final result.

Grooming, Lookdev, and Real-Time Rendering (Argentum Studio)

My name is Germans Alekseikovs, and on Flea, I worked as Technical Director at Argentum Studio, covering a broad range of responsibilities across pipeline development, lookdev, rendering, and technical problem-solving. Our goal throughout the project was to build a workflow that remained stable and predictable while still giving the creative team enough flexibility for fast iteration.

The character groom for Captain Itch was created entirely in Houdini by Artem Erikenov. Grooming is an area we've refined internally over many years, so the process itself was very smooth. For transferring the groom data into Unreal Engine, we relied on Argentum Studio's internal groom and Alembic cache pipeline, which has already been production-tested across multiple projects.

From a shading perspective, my main objective was achieving a semi-realistic look: stylised characters with believable lighting response and material depth. To accomplish this, we used our internal Hair Cinematic Tool, designed to push real-time/deferred rendering closer to the visual quality normally associated with path-traced rendering.

Unreal Engine still has limitations when handling Depth of Field on groom assets, so the team at SuperBlimp used Nuke during compositing to resolve those issues while preserving cinematic image quality. The overall pipeline followed a classic animation workflow: Maya → Alembic cache export → rendering in Unreal Engine.

At Argentum Studio, we use an internal Alembic Cache Pipeline that isolates many of the rigging and scene-management issues that typically appear inside Unreal Engine. The workflow becomes extremely straightforward and predictable: export, import, and render. This project also became the first full production test for our new Lighting Cinematic Tool.

I was very happy with the results, especially seeing how close real-time/deferred lighting is getting to the quality level expected from offline renderers such as V-Ray, Arnold, Cycles, and Redshift. Overall, collaborating with the SuperBlimp team was a great experience: highly professional, focused, and creatively very strong.

Lighting and Finish at SuperBlimp

With character animation cached from Maya into Unreal Engine via Argentum's pipeline, lighting and rendering were handled by Antonio Milo at SuperBlimp, working through Unreal Engine's deferred rendering path with Argentum's Lighting Cinematic Tool. The advantages of that setup were practical: in-session lookdev, fast iteration, and the ability to make creative calls live, seeing the result within seconds rather than between renders.

That workflow also shaped the final art direction of the film, allowing lighting, framing, colour, and character readability to be tuned together rather than treated as separate downstream steps. Final compositing was handled in Nuke, primarily to resolve the depth of field limitations on groom assets that Argentum flagged earlier.

The grade was done by Antonio in DaVinci Resolve. The Advantage endframe and brand lockup were added in edit. Sound design was handled in-house at SuperBlimp.

The Confrontation

The film builds to a short standoff in the hallway. Biscuit, the family cat, squares off against Captain Itch and delivers a clean kick that sends the flea recoiling toward the door. When the Advantage treatment is applied a beat later, Captain Itch loses his grip on the household and vanishes with a pop. The sequence is short, fast, and built on silhouette, weight, and timing.

Encounter's hand-keyed character animation carries the comedy. The timing of the kick and the flea's dismayed recoil is the payoff the entire piece is built toward. The clay to the final breakdown of this sequence is included alongside this piece and shows the build: each shot opens in clay, freezes, then wipes to the final beauty render, with the beauty playing out the rest of the shot. It's the kind of beat that only works when the underlying craft layers (rig, animation, groom, lighting) are pulling in the same direction.

Formats and Delivery

The campaign was delivered as a 20-second broadcast master, with 15-second cutdowns across awareness, consideration, and conversion, plus social formats in 16:9, 9:16, and 4:5. A 30-second director's cut was prepared for the wider case study release. Cat and dog variant key visuals followed from the same character and environment assets. Every deliverable was rendered natively for its platform rather than cropped from broadcast, which is the real-time pipeline made practical at the scale required.

Reflections

The collaboration worked because each studio owned a defined slice of authored craft, and the credits reflect that. Encounter Studio brought storyboard, animatic, character animation, and the modeling of Biscuit and Max. Argentum Studio brought grooming and technical direction. Antonio Milo directed the film at SuperBlimp, with the studio handling character design, modeling, and texturing of Captain Itch, Flo, Marti, and the environments, alongside lookdev, layout, lighting, rendering, compositing, editing, grading, and sound design.

The most interesting outcome, from a pipeline perspective, was not simply that Unreal Engine could produce cinematic character work, but that it held up inside a real commercial production with complex groom assets, frequent iteration, editorial pressure, and a large deliverables pack. As Germans noted, the visual gap between deferred real-time rendering and more traditional offline workflows is narrowing quickly.

On Flea, that mattered. Unreal Engine was not a lookdev experiment sitting beside the production. It was the rendering backbone of the production itself. From a director's perspective, that practical confidence in the pipeline mattered more than any single technical advance. It meant creative decisions could be made live, in engine, with the final image visible in real time rather than filtered through the delay of an offline render queue. That changes what directing feels like inside a CG production. It also changes what becomes possible late in the schedule.

Credits

• Client: Elanco (Advantage Spot On)
• Agency: MBC
• Agency Creative Director and Writer: Roshan Kapoor
• Agency Account Director: Jill Cosh

SuperBlimp

Character design, modeling, and texturing (Captain Itch, Flo, Marti, environments), lookdev, layout, lighting, rendering, compositing, edit, grade, sound design, and finish.

• Director: Antonio Milo
• Executive Producer: Mathieu Leborgne
• Lighting, Rendering, Grade: Antonio Milo
• Character Lookdev and Texturing: Federico Abram

Encounter Studio

Storyboard, animatic, character animation, rigging, modeling, and texturing (Biscuit, Max).

• Rigging: Andrew Bashforth
• Animation: Daniel Crook

Argentum Studio

Grooming lookdev, technical direction.

• Technical Director: Germans Alekseikovs
• Grooming Artist: Artem Erikenov

Full case study

Antonio Milo, Director at SuperBlimp, with Encounter Studio and Argentum Studio