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Animating Puss in Boots' Feather in Shrek 2
Puss in Boots, a new character in Shrek 2, wears an ostrich feather in his hat that had to move convincingly.
Abstract
Puss in Boots, a new character in Shrek 2, wears an ostrich feather in his hat that had to move convincingly. The technique combines a coarse simulation of an underlying surface, designed to run quickly and produce stable predictable results, with detailed procedural animation applied to the barbs. The barb animation is computed at render time and oscillates the individual barbs of the feather to add lively secondary motion.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk / breakdown: feather animation for a film character
- Contributions
- Demonstrates animating Puss in Boots' ostrich hat feather in Shrek 2 by combining a coarse, fast, stable underlying-surface simulation with detailed procedural barb animation
- Computes barb motion at render time, oscillating individual barbs to add lively secondary motion
- Context
- A production technique in the secondary-motion and procedural-detail tradition, pairing a cheap simulated base with render-time procedural enrichment for feather dynamics.
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; the coarse-sim-plus-procedural-barbs approach is production-proven for one character's shot needs, and its generality beyond that look is not claimed.
- Clarity
- Very accessible; a single read conveys the coarse-base-plus-procedural-detail idea.
- How to read it
- Read once for the layering strategy (stable coarse sim + render-time procedural barbs); a useful mental pattern for adding secondary motion cheaply rather than a formal method.
Related work
- Feathers for Mystical Creatures: Pegasus 2010 / SIGGRAPH
- Rendertime Procedural Feathers Through Blended Guide Meshes 2008 / SIGGRAPH
- Hummingbird: DreamWorks Feather System 2019 / SIGGRAPH
- Mesh-Driven Generation and Animation of Groomed Feathers 2019 / SIGGRAPH
Keywords
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