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Creating the Art-Directed Groom for Legend in Disney's Strange World
Houdini-supplemented XGen groom pipeline for Strange World's dog Legend, translating French-Belgian comic book fur aesthetics into a production groom.
Abstract
Translating the design language of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ "Strange World" onto a fur groom for the Clade family’s lovable dog, Legend, at a level of scrutiny that is often reserved for our human characters led us to exploration outside of our regular workflows. The groom had to adhere to the artistic vision of the Visual Development and Animation teams while still working within our pipeline and staying consumable by downstream departments. We were able to leverage Houdini to supplement Disney’s XGen to meet the aesthetic needs of the show. With Houdini we were able to quickly put down fur similar to our map-based grooming methods and because we folded that into a similar workflow as our in-house hierarchical grooming tool, Tonic, we were able to maintain the ability to fine-tune at a more granular level. Through thoughtful collaboration we were able to deliver a fun and unique groom while exploring new techniques that will open up new possibilities for grooming workflows moving forward.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk: art-directed fur groom pipeline
- Contributions
- Shows a groom for the dog Legend that meets a comic-book fur aesthetic at human-character levels of scrutiny
- Leverages Houdini to supplement Disney's XGen, quickly laying down fur similar to map-based grooming methods
- Folds the Houdini approach into a workflow akin to the in-house hierarchical tool Tonic to keep granular fine-tuning and downstream consumability
- Context
- Extends Disney's art-directed hair practice, building on hierarchical controls for art-directed hair (Kaur 2018) and the in-house Tonic tool.Builds on: Hierarchical Controls for Art-Directed Hair at Disney
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; results are production-proven on Strange World, and the techniques are framed as exploratory openings for future workflows rather than a general groom solution.
- Clarity
- Accessible to grooming practitioners; one read conveys the Houdini-plus-XGen integration and the downstream constraints it had to respect.
- How to read it
- Read for how Houdini was reconciled with XGen and Tonic while keeping downstream departments happy; one pass suffices unless you grom in this pipeline.
Builds on
Built upon by
Nothing yet.
Related work
- Embroidery and Cloth Fiber Workflows on Disney's Encanto 2022 / SIGGRAPH
- Creatures in Houdini | Ahmed Gharraph | FMX 2019 2019 / FMX
- Feathers: From Model to Groom to Render | nineteentwenty | Character FX & Crowds Production Talks 2019 / Houdini
- Framestore Creatures & Houdini | Framestore | Character FX & Crowds Production Talks 2019 / Houdini
Keywords
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