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Hair, Feathers and Fur | Axis Studios | Character FX & Crowds Production Talks
Axis Studios team presents their move to Houdini for hair simulation, feathers, and fur, detailing technical solutions and challenges across AAA game trailer creature productions.
Abstract
Axis Studios' Hudson, Camille and Philip describe moving their character FX pipeline from Maya nCloth hair to a full Houdini workflow for the Elder Scrolls game cinematic trailer, built in roughly 12 weeks on Houdini 16.5 before Vellum existed. Camille covers the grooming approach, including a two-tier guide system where low-resolution guides are exported as ribbons for animators to place hero hair, a custom Axis Hair Deformer that caches Hair Gen output and deforms it with a less averaged falloff than the native point deformer, and a procedural feather system that scatters barbs along guide curves for the griffin. Philip details a grain-based constraint hair solver built in SOPs with local and global constraints to preserve groom shapes, a post-simulation tool in OpenCL that keeps strand length to add noise, blend shapes and wind without full simulation, and feathers and strings scattered and solved together with the hair. They close on switching to Vellum in Houdini 17, which replaces their custom solver, removes jitter and instability, and lets the faster hair generator run live to skip guide-deformation interpolation errors, with rendering in Mantra and comp moving from Fusion toward Nuke.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk (character FX pipeline move to Houdini)
- Contributions
- Describes moving from Maya nCloth hair to a full Houdini character-FX workflow for a game cinematic trailer, including a two-tier guide system and a custom Axis Hair Deformer with a less-averaged falloff
- Details a grain-based constraint hair solver in SOPs with local and global constraints to preserve groom shape, plus a procedural feather system scattering barbs along guides
- Shows an OpenCL post-simulation tool that preserves strand length while adding noise, blendshapes and wind without full simulation, and the later switch to Vellum in H17 to remove jitter and instability
- Context
- A studio breakdown of a creature-FX pipeline transition, situated against Maya nCloth hair and the emergence of Houdini Vellum as a replacement for custom grain/constraint solvers.
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; results are production-proven on the named trailer under a tight ~12-week schedule, and the custom solver and post-sim choices reflect a pre-Vellum era now partly superseded, which is worth keeping in mind.
- Clarity
- Accessible to FX TDs; multi-speaker but a single viewing conveys the grooming, solver and post-sim threads.
- How to read it
- Watch once for the pipeline arc from custom solver to Vellum; revisit the grain-solver constraints and OpenCL post-sim segments if building groom-preserving hair, but note Vellum may now replace the custom pieces.
Related work
- Creatures in Houdini | Ahmed Gharraph | FMX 2019 2019 / FMX
- Feathers: From Model to Groom to Render | nineteentwenty | Character FX & Crowds Production Talks 2019 / Houdini
- Grooming and Simulation Methods for Different Hair Types | Andriy Bilichenko | Paris HIVE 2023 2023 / Houdini
- Creating a Photorealistic Hyena 2022 / FMX
Keywords
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