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Creating a Photorealistic Hyena

Tony Atherton

FMXIndustrialCFXMuscles

The Mill FX Supervisor walks through grooming, muscle and skin creation, and Vellum-based fur simulation in Houdini to produce Hattie the Hyena for an Amazon holiday commercial.

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Abstract

The Mill London FX supervisor Tony Atherton details the creation of Hattie the hyena for an Amazon Prime Christmas advert, all done in Houdini and rendered in Arnold via h2a. He covers grooming with guide curves and the hair generate node, driving length and variation from painted attribute maps and a Labs curvature measure, plus micro grooming controls like clumping and frizz. The muscle pipeline uses the Houdini 19 beta muscle tools with anatomically correct bones and muscles, fiber groom contraction painting, automatic muscle tension lines, and a Vellum-based solver, layered into successive tissue (tetrahedral) and skin simulations. He also shows fur simulation in Vellum with guide-to-form sticking and resampling, fake tips and tricks using lag chops and delta mush to add bounce, wind and collisions, and a TOPs-based scene builder for templated shot lighting and assembly.

How to read this

Category
Production talk / photoreal creature CFX breakdown
Contributions
  • A full grooming workflow in Houdini using guide curves and the hair-generate node, driving length and variation from painted maps and a curvature measure, plus micro-grooming controls like clumping and frizz
  • A muscle pipeline on the Houdini 19 beta muscle tools (anatomical bones and muscles, fiber-groom contraction painting, automatic tension lines, Vellum solver) layered into successive tissue (tet) and skin simulations
  • Vellum fur simulation with guide-to-form sticking and resampling, fake bounce via lag chops and delta mush, wind and collisions, and a TOPs scene builder for templated shot lighting and assembly
Context
A photoreal creature pipeline drawing on anatomically based muscle simulation in the tradition of Teran et al. (2005), realized through Houdini's muscle and Vellum tools and rendered in Arnold.Builds on: Creating and Simulating Skeletal Muscle from the Visible Human Data Set
Correctness
Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; results are production-proven on a single hyena character (Hattie) for an Amazon commercial, and it relies on beta tooling, so treat it as a concrete recipe rather than a stable or general method.
Clarity
Very concrete and accessible; one pass conveys the groom-muscle-tissue-skin-fur stack, with node-level tips useful as reference.
How to read it
Read once for the layered anatomical-to-skin-to-fur workflow and the fake-bounce/TOPs tricks; revisit the muscle and Vellum specifics if you are setting up a comparable creature in Houdini.

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Keywords

houdinigroomguide curveshair generateclumpingfrizzvellummuscle simulationtissue simulationskin simulationtetrahedronsmuscle tension linesfiber groomfurcreatureattribute paintdelta mushlag choparnoldh2a

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