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The Making of CG Animals
Framestore's Head of Groom and CFX covers their feather pipeline, complex grooming for furry creatures, and CFX workflows simulating muscles, fat, skin, and hair at episodic scale.
Abstract
Framestore's head of groom and CFX details the studio's fully Houdini-based pipeline for CG animals across episodic and advertising work. She walks through Barbarella, their in-house feather system, covering feather design from drawn shafts and barbs, curvature profiles, barb-bend and screw-finesse breakups, split tools, a procedural pattern generator with stripes and dots, plus a sock-mesh splatting and balloon-style intersection cleanup for placing and folding feathers. The talk then covers fur work including layered sub-clump curling for wool, dynamic parting lines, probability maps for fur coloration, and per-shot groom variants (wet, messy, bouffant) driven by HDAs with particle layers for dust and droplets. She closes on making CFX efficient via reusable templates that assemble muscle, fat, skin-sliding and fur setups, with tetrahedron-based flesh simulation, REST caches and a beta CFX tracker for spotting out-of-date caches, rendering primarily in Redshift with Mantra for some FX.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk / pipeline breakdown (groom and CFX)
- Contributions
- Walks through Framestore's fully Houdini-based feather system (Barbarella): feather design from shafts and barbs, curvature profiles, breakups, split tools and a procedural pattern generator.
- Covers fur work (layered sub-clump curling, dynamic parting lines, probability maps for coloration) and per-shot groom variants driven by HDAs.
- Presents CFX efficiency via reusable templates assembling muscle, fat, skin-sliding and fur, with tetrahedron-based flesh sim, REST caches and a beta CFX cache tracker.
- Context
- Relates to muscle/flesh simulation lineage (cf. Teran et al., 2005 on simulating skeletal muscle) and to in-house feather/groom systems, applied at episodic and advertising scale.Builds on: Creating and Simulating Skeletal Muscle from the Visible Human Data Set
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; the workflows are production-proven on real shows but tooling is specific to Framestore's Houdini/Redshift/Mantra pipeline and may not transfer directly.
- Clarity
- Accessible and demo-driven; a single viewing conveys the workflow, no formal derivations to revisit.
- How to read it
- Watch for the reusable-template and cache-tracking ideas if you run a CFX pipeline; treat specific tool names as inspiration rather than a spec, and note which tricks are feather-specific versus general groom.
Built upon by
Nothing yet.
Related work
- KineFX: Creature FX | Gabriela Salmeron - Framestore | KineFEST 2025 2025 / Houdini
- Stags & Stripes, Creating Photoreal Characters | Framestore | FMX HIVE Europe 2021 2021 / FMX
- Hair, Feathers and Fur | Axis Studios | Character FX & Crowds Production Talks 2019 / Houdini
- Creating a Photorealistic Hyena 2022 / FMX
Keywords
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