← ArchiveTalk2019
Framestore Creatures & Houdini | Framestore | Character FX & Crowds Production Talks
Framestore's head of CG digs into their creature archive spanning standout productions, discussing grooming and solver challenges overcome with Houdini at the London HUG workshop.
Abstract
Ahmed Gharraph of Framestore walks through the studio's creature work in Houdini, centering on the blubbery cat Mog, a Mercedes hair piece, a Sony wildebeest herd, and McDonald's reindeer. For Mog he describes driving fleshy deformation with Houdini's FEM solver, embedding an animated skeleton inside an FEM volume to get volume-preserving secondary motion instead of relying on blendshapes and skin weights, and exposing a squishiness attribute in the Maya rig plus an automated farm pipeline that simulated CFX and fur from each animation cache. The reindeer combined an FBX skeleton, a Houdini muscle rig with jiggle controls embedded in an FEM solid, and a hybrid object for skin sliding and wrinkles, with grooming built from manually combed guide curves and layered sub-clumps. He also covers using the Houdini fur tools and wire solver for hair-through-fingers collisions on the Mercedes job, time-stretched fur simulation for the 4000-frames-per-second wildebeest, and driving fur color and the Arnold melanin shader from painted point attributes rather than Mari color maps.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk (creature FX, grooming and solver case studies)
- Contributions
- Demonstrates driving fleshy deformation with Houdini's FEM solver, embedding an animated skeleton in an FEM volume for volume-preserving secondary motion (the cat Mog)
- Shows a reindeer pipeline combining an FBX skeleton, a Houdini muscle rig with jiggle in an FEM solid, and a hybrid object for skin sliding and wrinkles
- Covers fur tools and the wire solver for hair-through-fingers collisions, time-stretched fur for a very-high-fps wildebeest, and driving fur color via painted point attributes into the Arnold melanin shader
- Context
- A studio survey of creature work across multiple productions, grounded in Houdini's FEM and fur/wire solvers and a Maya-rig-plus-farm CFX pipeline.
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; results are production-proven on the named shots, and the FEM-embedding choices over blendshape/skin-weight approaches reflect art-direction and pipeline tradeoffs rather than measured comparisons.
- Clarity
- Accessible to FX TDs; a single viewing conveys the approaches, with solver specifics assuming Houdini familiarity.
- How to read it
- Watch once for the catalog of techniques, then revisit the Mog FEM-embedding and reindeer hybrid-object segments if you need volume-preserving flesh or skin-sliding setups.
Builds on
Nothing in the archive, this is a starting point.
Built upon by
Related work
Keywords
This page summarises the entry and links to its original source. The archive never hosts or redistributes the publication itself.Show it in the full archive list →