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Automation of Creature FX in a Small Studio Pipeline
Bacon X Co-head of CG shows how Houdini's FEM and Vellum solvers automate reliable skin and fur simulation for a fully digital baby wild hog creature in a small-studio pipeline.
Abstract
David Lessel of Copenhagen studio Bacon X walks through the CFX setup built for a fully CG baby wild hog commercial across 25 shots, combining Maya, Yeti and V-Ray for asset development, animation and lighting with Houdini's FEM and Vellum solvers for skin and fur. He details a single reusable Houdini setup driven by a shot manager that pulls animation, guides and collision caches from Shotgun via Alembic, plus a rest-transform trick using bounding-box polylines so the rest pose lines up with any incoming animation. The FEM workflow remeshes and tetrahedralizes the high-res mesh, constrains skeleton points with hard FEM target constraints, paints stiffness and damping via group and attribute-blur nodes, then transfers the sim back to the subdivided Maya mesh and masks out face, ears, tail and hooves. He covers the Vellum guide-curve simulation for stiff fur with disable-self and disable-external collision attributes, optional self and environment collisions, and an in-house Cache Fire tool that daisy-chains farm jobs through Royal Render to update rigs, animation, Houdini sims, Yeti caches, lighting and slap comps overnight.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk / creature-FX automation breakdown
- Contributions
- A single reusable Houdini setup driven by a shot manager that pulls animation, guides and collision caches from Shotgun via Alembic, with a bounding-box-polyline rest-transform trick to align the rest pose to incoming animation
- An FEM skin workflow that remeshes and tetrahedralizes the mesh, constrains skeleton points with hard target constraints, paints stiffness/damping, and transfers the sim back to the subdivided Maya mesh while masking face, ears, tail and hooves
- A Vellum guide-curve fur sim with self/external collision controls plus an in-house Cache Fire tool that daisy-chains farm jobs through Royal Render to update the full chain overnight
- Context
- A small-studio creature-FX pipeline combining Maya/Yeti/V-Ray with Houdini FEM and Vellum solvers, situated in the standard tet-FEM-flesh and position-based-cloth/fur simulation tradition.
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; results are production-proven on a 25-shot CG baby wild hog commercial, so the value is reliable workflow recipes rather than generalizable claims, and choices are scaled to a small team.
- Clarity
- Highly concrete and accessible; a single pass conveys the setup, with node-level detail useful as a reference.
- How to read it
- Read once end-to-end for the reusable-setup and overnight-farm automation patterns; revisit the rest-transform trick and FEM constraint/masking specifics if you are building a comparable small-studio CFX rig.
Related work
Keywords
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