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Creatures in Houdini | Ahmed Gharraph | FMX 2019

Ahmed Gharraph

FMXIndustrial3 descendantsCFX

Framestore FMX talk on photo-realistic furry creature creation, exploring grooming techniques developed across multiple productions including advertising and episodic work.

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Abstract

Ahmed Gharraph of Framestore details the studio's grooming and fur workflow in Houdini across commercials and television creatures including a wildebeest, an Ikea sheep, McDonald's reindeer with a Digi-double Santa beard, and a black bear. He explains a guide-based approach that starts with curve flows and hand-planted guides, mirrors one side, then builds clumps within clumps using stacked hairgen nodes whose density dictates clump size, all driven by painted maps and masks. The talk covers procedural dirt setups using an occlusion-shop technique from Matt Estella's CG Wiki, color and melanin driven by point attributes rather than textures, and Framestore's custom HairGen and HairDeformer that interpolate over the surface to cut guide-capture time on the reindeer from twenty hours to about five minutes. He closes with an in-development feather system that piggybacks on the Houdini groom tools and uses Vellum to solve feather-on-feather stacking.

How to read this

Category
Production talk / grooming and fur breakdown
Contributions
  • Demonstrates a guide-based Houdini fur workflow (curve flows, hand-planted guides, mirroring, stacked hairgen clumps-within-clumps driven by painted maps) across creatures including a wildebeest, an Ikea sheep, McDonald's reindeer, and a black bear
  • Shows procedural dirt via an occlusion-shop technique and color and melanin driven by point attributes rather than textures
  • Presents Framestore's custom HairGen and HairDeformer (cutting reindeer guide capture from about twenty hours to five minutes) and an in-development Vellum-based feather system
Context
A Framestore creature-FX talk continuing the studio's grooming and Houdini practice (related to its London Creatures and Houdini production talks).Builds on: Framestore Creatures & Houdini | Framestore | Character FX & Crowds Production Talks
Correctness
Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; results are production-proven on specific commercials and TV creatures, and figures such as the twenty-hours-to-five-minutes speedup are reported gains rather than controlled measurements.
Clarity
Hands-on and tool-specific; accessible to Houdini groom artists, with concrete node-level technique that rewards a careful watch.
How to read it
Watch for the clumps-within-clumps guide method and the HairGen/HairDeformer interpolation; focus on the attribute-driven color and the in-progress Vellum feather system if grooming is your area.

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Related work

Keywords

houdinigroomfurguide curvesclumpingsub-clumpshairgenhair deformerfur simulationfeathersvellumcurve flowsmasksocclusionmelanin shadercreature

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