← ArchiveTalk2021
Stags & Stripes, Creating Photoreal Characters | Framestore | FMX HIVE Europe 2021
Framestore's Head of Groom and CFX presents two BAFTA-nominated photoreal creatures from different TV series, covering the full groom and CFX simulation process in Houdini.
Abstract
Framestore's head of groom and CFX, alongside a head of CG, breaks down two photoreal creatures built in Houdini: a Scottish red stag for The Crown and a ringtail lemur for His Dark Materials. For the stag she covers a 15-million-hair semi-wet groom with a heavy neck mane, manual guide-by-guide combing, adaptive per-hair segment counts based on length and curvature, probabilistic color maps driving the Redshift shader, and parallel groom processing plus render-time procedurals to beat memory limits. A rewritten hair deformer keeps tight wet clumps locked to simulated guides (now shipping in Houdini's guide deform as the Framestore algorithm), with scattered layers of blood, grass, mud and water droplets, a Vellum muscle, interop, fascia and skin setup for skin sliding and wrinkles, and a SOP-level ray-based wind field feeding Vellum. For the lemur she presents a newly built dynamic parting-line tool, developed in three weeks, that opens and closes fur partings from skin stretchiness using proximity-based collision without simulation, alongside volume-preserving CFX and blend shapes.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk / groom and CFX breakdown
- Contributions
- Breaks down two photoreal creatures in Houdini: a 15-million-hair semi-wet stag groom and a ringtail lemur
- Shows a rewritten hair deformer that locks wet clumps to simulated guides (now shipped in Houdini's guide deform as the Framestore algorithm), plus Vellum muscle, fascia and skin-sliding setup
- Presents a proximity-based dynamic parting-line tool that opens and closes fur partings from skin stretch without simulation
- Context
- Continues Framestore's Houdini creature-FX practice (following Gharraph's Creatures in Houdini, FMX 2019), applied to BAFTA-nominated TV work on The Crown and His Dark Materials.Builds on: Creatures in Houdini | Ahmed Gharraph | FMX 2019
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; the techniques are production-proven on shipped shows and constrained by render-time memory and schedule realities (for example the parting-line tool built in three weeks), so treat the methods as battle-tested recipes rather than generalized claims.
- Clarity
- Accessible and example-driven; a single viewing conveys the pipeline, with rewatching useful for the specific tool and shader details.
- How to read it
- Watch once for the end-to-end groom-to-CFX workflow and the wet-clump and parting-line tricks; revisit specific segments when solving a comparable fur or skin-sliding problem.
Builds on
Related work
Keywords
This page summarises the entry and links to its original source. The archive never hosts or redistributes the publication itself.Show it in the full archive list →