Create animals

We have done many fur jobs at Framestore CFC. However, it was only when we won the ‘Go Wild’ commercial for the deodorant brand Rexona (or Sure in the UK), which was to feature over 300 furry 3D animals, that we realised that we would not achieve our goals using the same techniques we had relied on before. Here, we reveal just some of what we’ve learned about animal animation from past productions and during the ‘Go Wild’ project, with several members of the Framestore CFC team offering their insights in the key areas of creature production.

The biggest bottlenecks for any fur-oriented pipeline are the grooming and the dynamic simulations. Grooming, in its technical sense, refers to the description within the computer of the look of the fur: not just the directions it points in, but also the length, the colour, and all of the attributes that make it unique. We needed a whole new way of doing the grooming, one that was far simpler, easier and, above all, quicker - but that yielded the same results. I thought it might be possible by working in Houdini. I bounced my ideas off senior technical director Dan Seddon: he agreed that the potential benefits were enormous, so we decided to go for it…

Dan and I worked together. While I was setting up a grooming system to create animals that each had between one and two thousand dynamically simulated guide hairs, Dan wrote and implemented a RenderMan plug-in, or DSO, that would take these guide hairs and efficiently render them at between three and four million hairs.

There is a basic scene (.hip) file for any Houdini users, which you can download here, that shows the dynamics and grooming workflow we used. However Side Effects Software (Houdini’s creator) is soon to release its own fur tools and renderer.

Click here to download the support files (226MB)