A lot of research went in creating the designs for the characters with references from hunting and fishing gear from Vietnam, Gambia, and Benin along with other sources.

Creating Juno's hair was difficult, to make it look stylized and painterly, but also curly and natural. We took a lot of reference from Spiderverse and Arcane for this and used tools in Houdini to find a custom way to generate hair for his character.

For Bonabon, a lot of work went into developing the textures and design for her and we wanted her to feel elegant, wise, and sturdy while also keeping a similar feeling to Juno as far as design. A lot of her textures were based on catfish and koi fish and while Juno leaned more towards Gambian and Benin designs, she leaned more towards the Vietnamese side of things as far as references.

When developing our visual style, we wanted to create animation that had a large range of expression like in Nimona, as well as the facial creases from Spiderverse and a painterly style similar to Arcane, but with more physical based shaders to keep lighting detail and texture detail for our fish characters.

    In order to achieve the semi-painterly look that we had envisioned, we needed to experiment with hand painted textures, procedural as well as hand placed cards and other stylized compositing techniques.
    The trees were driven by emission and color jitter nodes which made them especially difficult to shade and light.
    Set dressing the bar was challenging as we needed a plethora of elements to make the bar come alive. Each element was thought out and placed to contribute to the story.
   For lighting and compositing, the forest setting brought a whole new level of challenge. Dealing with dense shadows and keeping the overall mood consistent across shots took a lot of trial and error.
   The infamous Catfish Steakhouse was another challenge. The warm, rich tones of the wood had to feel inviting but not overpower the characters. Reflections and bounce light were tricky to balance, especially with so many natural materials interacting in the space. Keeping the magical vibe meant adding subtle glowing elements and soft volumetric through our lanterns that were carefully placed to make sure every corner of the restaurant felt lived-in and atmospheric.
    Each scene had its own quirks—whether it was fog/volume reacting weirdly to the light or subtle color shifts between renders that threw things off. It was a constant push to make sure everything felt cohesive, but in the end, we pulled through, especially with some last-minute color correction passes that really tied it all together.