Mr. Pistachio sings, he dances, and generally performs for your entertainment - Tom Jones numbers are an especial favorite of his. Vital statistics are: 1019 spline patches, 25 bones, 3 bump decals for lips, skin and shell. The lighting setup consists of a key/set point shadow casting light above and to the right; kicker parallel soft blue bottom left; center face white soft klieg; warm set fill klieg above and towards the back wall; back light above and behind the character.
These images are from an 875 frame (25fps) clip of Mr. Pistachio singing a Tom Jones track that I animated back in 1997 as an experiment in applying lip-synch to 3D characters. Lip synchronization was generated using LipSYNCH, software written by Ken Morton, that allowed easy keying and adjustment of facial poses. Body movements were blocked after the mouth, again using LipSynch, with skeletal bone poses manually dropped into the animation action sequence from the LipSynch data. Overlapping actions were added by offsetting sections of the final bone channel curves.