I was lucky enough to work on this great spot at Nexus Productions last year, and I recently came across this making-of that shows a glimpse of the hard work that was involved.
It was a amazing to see, up-close, the incredible attention to detail that the model makers put in to their 1/10th scale that our CG characters were to inhabit.
I was tasked with taking the reference photography and spherical HDRs and generating light rigs for each scene. Ben Cowell went the extra mile to make this process as painless as possible by providing some very cute 3d-printed maquettes of some characters which were placed into reference photography to help us achieve a good match in CG.
This is the first time I had seen 3d printing used in this kind of situation and it is definitely something I would try to do again in the future. You can’t do much better than having your CG characters shot for real in your plates!