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Feathers: From Model to Groom to Render | nineteentwenty | Character FX & Crowds Production Talks
Head of 3D at nineteentwenty walks the full feather pipeline from modelling through grooming to rendering in Houdini for Royal Marines and KFC commercial creature work.
Abstract
Chris King, Head of 3D at nineteentwenty, walks through the studio's first full-geometry feather pipeline built in Houdini and rendered in Mantra for the KFC Christmas campaign, covering a Rhode Island red chicken and a black turkey. He explains building poly planes along each hair using a stable orient, generating feathers with the Houdini feather builder, and breaking each feather into barb segments instanced as packed disc primitives along hair points to keep render times and memory low instead of using textured planes. Dynamics are handled with the wire solver using wide hair and skin collisions, with intersections addressed via post-sim interpolation between neighboring feathers and a per-feather wire-mesh simulation for extreme close-ups. He also covers paintable per-feather and per-barb shader pickups, delta mush smoothing in the neck, rigging primary and secondary flight feathers, and notes Vellum as a future option.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk (feather pipeline, model to groom to render)
- Contributions
- Demonstrates a full-geometry feather pipeline in Houdini and Mantra, building poly planes along hair with a stable orient and the feather builder
- Shows instancing barb segments as packed disc primitives along hair points to keep render time and memory low instead of textured planes
- Covers wire-solver dynamics with hair and skin collisions, post-sim interpolation and per-feather wire-mesh sims for close-ups, plus paintable per-feather/per-barb shader pickups and neck delta mush
- Context
- A studio breakdown of creature feather work for commercial productions, situated in the Houdini grooming/wire-solver ecosystem and the broader move from textured-plane feathers to full geometry.
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; the techniques are production-proven on the described chicken and turkey shots, so the memory/render tradeoffs and Vellum being noted only as a future option are context-specific choices rather than benchmarked claims.
- Clarity
- Accessible to FX artists; a single viewing conveys the pipeline shape, though some Houdini node specifics assume familiarity.
- How to read it
- Watch once end-to-end for the modelling-to-render flow, then revisit the barb-instancing and intersection-fix segments if you are actually building a feather setup.
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